


the heart its own rough animal

by trepan



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-08-30 17:40:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8542645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trepan/pseuds/trepan
Summary: The three boys are her age. 11 used to imagine other children, after 10 and 9 went away. For a moment, she thinks she dreamed them, but they all have daemons on their shoulders, pointy ones with glossy black all over their small bodies. Children don’t have daemons.“Where’s her daemon,” says one of the boys urgently. “Guys, she doesn’t have one.”(A His Dark Materials AU)





	1. Chapter 1

 

11 opens her eyes in the middle of the night.

Sometimes Papa wakes her on purpose, but tonight he isn't there. She glances around, half-blind.

Nothing.

What woke her? 11 doesn't wake for nothing. She digs through her body in her mind, swipes a finger under her nose. She is intact. There is no sound except her own breath against the sheet, no movement except her own pulse battering the skin just above her navel.

Then it happens again. This is what woke her. 

A vibration, like heavy bass, travels through her, making her inner ears itch. She digs a finger into the left one, but it doesn't stop itching until the wave has passed. She's hot all over, suddenly, sweating. 

It's getting closer. 

The next wave hits forty-seven seconds later. That's when she hears the screaming. 

It's Dr. Pete screaming. 11 knows his name because his non-cat, non-mouse, non-rat daemon calls him Pete all the time, even at work. None of the other doctors' daemons use their names. She supposes it's like talking to yourself. 

11 can't help it; she reaches for his thoughts. A lance of pain at the backs of her eyeballs as she hits the metal door. She puts her palms to her eyes and presses, angry at herself. She knows what will happen and yet she does it anyway. Papa calls it cussedness. 

Another wave. She doubles over. This is not the worst test 11 has passed. She can sweat all night. She can sweat all night, Papa. 

Another. Another. Closer. 

A ripping-metal noise, like an enormous can opener. 11 digs her fingers into her ears and squeezes her eyes shut. 

The wave subsides. She feels it pass through her and dissipate, like a death. 

11 opens her eyes. 

The door has been ripped away. At the end of the hallway, she can see Dr. Pete's body, what's left of it. His non-cat, non-mouse, non-rat daemon is gone. The hallway smells like a nosebleed. 

She takes one step out, then two. 

This is not a test. She understands now. This is her chance. 

 

 

 

You know, the stupid thing is that everyone thinks Will's a fag--even Joyce, although she won't say the word out loud--but it's Jonathan, run-of-the-mill dumbass weirdo Jonathan, who's locked in the America Video men's bathroom with Hank Baldrin.

Hank is twenty-one but as slight and small as a sophomore in high school. He laughs too loudly and likes to recreate scenes from Monty Python with no help or indeed encouragement from anyone else; often his honeybee daemon takes the role of a supporting character, but since, like most daemons, the honeybee doesn't speak to anyone but Hank and sometimes Hank's family, this results in a very one-sided performance. 

Now the honeybee buzzes around the bathroom as Hank leans against the sink, his pink cock barely visible for the motion of his hand. He's watching Jonathan jerking himself off, only half-hard--the honeybee is really distracting. Filomena never does that, buzz around people's heads like that. She's perched on the top of the nearest stall, turned politely away from the action.

The honeybee misses his eyebrow by several inches. Jonathan flinches even though he knows it won't touch him. It's just--courtesy. Fuck. 

"Oh, yeah," Hank says. He's never very verbal during these bathroom sessions. His face is a mottled pink and white. "Keep--yeah." 

Jonathan strokes himself, lets his jeans sag a little. This is the part he likes the most, when Hank opens his eyes and Jonathan can feel his gaze. He never feels beautiful except when Hank is looking at him like that. 

 

 

The store closed at midnight, so there's no reason to keep the bathroom door locked, but they have always locked it. Jonathan thinks sometimes about what it would be like to have somebody want you the way he sees boys want girls at school, panting, chasing, shoving him against a locker, mouth on his like they might die. Hank isn't like that. It's not personal. Hank is a very methodical person. He counts the register at a careful speed of one bill per second, even though he's been a manager for two years. That boring, metronome quality is probably why no one ever messes with Hank about being a fag. He's just so regular that it would be rude to bother him about it, the same way no one wants to tell middle-aged men that their combovers hide nothing.

When Jonathan had asked Hank if he wanted to hang out in the back for a little while, Hank had blinked and said "Oh, okay, JJ," like Jonathan had suggested they compare baseball card collections.

Jonathan unlocks the bathroom door.

"Hey, that was great," Hank says, hugging him awkwardly from behind. "Did you have a good time, JJ?"

"Yeah. Great." Jonathan shrugs him off, not unkindly. There's nothing wrong with Hank. He's really grateful that the only other queer in the neighborhood happened to be a nice guy who works at the video store.

Filomena flutters down to perch on his shoulder. He hears the little scritchy sounds of her claws on the threads of his denim shirt. It's a comfort noise, like the rubber suck of the refrigerator door.

The honeybee zips past his ear on the way out. _Zzzznnn._

He bikes home in the dark, Filomena flying just above his head, a comforting little blue-and-orange blur. People can feel what their daemons feel, some more than others. On the long downhill slope from Foster to Peach Jonathan speeds up, feels the air take him.

No lights in the windows when he gets home. Will has knocked the phone off the hook somehow. Jonathan replaces it in the cradle and goes to look in on Will. He’s a lump of blankets in the middle of the bed. Jonathan shuts the door quietly and heads down the hallway.

Lonnie is four months behind on child support. Jonathan checked. He lies down on his bed. The trick is to never give yourself a single moment of peace. Then you never have time to panic.

“You want to read?” Filomena asks, hopping from the bedside table onto his chest.

He strokes her head with his thumb absentmindedly. “Yeah.”

“Ants or space?”

“Ants.” He digs the book out from under the bed, briefly dislodging Filomena, and holds it open with one hand, closing his eyes.

“Ant-colony life has evolved over the past one hundred million years from the less social lives of the ants’ ancestors, the wasps. The evolution of colony behavior hinges on how well a colony functions, relative to the other colonies in its population. . . .” Filomena reads.

At the end of the chapter, she hops over to the lamp, stretching their bond, and unplugs it with her beak. Jonathan drifts to sleep with her feathers brushing gently against his ear.

 

 

It feels like 11 has walked for a very long time. Her feet are bleeding, one on the toe, one on the heel. She has passed many buildings, but they all have too many windows. She doesn’t look like anybody else on the Outside. Papa will see her.

At last circumstance gets the best of her. One building has a smell in it that makes 11’s mouth hurt. She stumbles, then almost falls. She cannot walk much farther. She turns toward the building and goes in through the back door.

Inside there are two men, but they are both looking at a long flat metal table where things are sizzling. Behind them is another long table, this one wooden, and it has bread on it. 11 grabs the bread, crouches, and stuffs it in her mouth. It is hard to swallow dry, but makes her head spin with how good it tastes.

She stands up again to get more bread. A daemon that is not a cat, a mouse, or a rat turns its head toward her. It is big and has teeth. “Hey!” barks a man next to it.

11 bolts. The daemon bolts, too, blocking the door before she can get to it. She skids and goes the other way, feeling the cut on her heel rip open further. The other way is full of people. Behind her is the table. She looks up. The man is in front of her, his face screwed up in anger. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he says.

11 doesn’t know what to say. It was stealing, she knows; that’s wrong.

His face changes. 11 hears his mind: _. . . skinny, some kind of runaway? . . ._

She tries to bolt again, but the daemon herds her, snapping at her heels. “Please don’t call Papa,” she blurts.

He makes another face she doesn’t understand, and the next thought comes through louder, clearer than the others: _Kid’s dad should be in prison._

11 relaxes. He’s not going to call Papa. “May I leave?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “You may sit down and have a cheeseburger.”

“What is it?”

The man and his daemon stare at her. “What’s a cheeseburger?” he asks.

11 nods.

He grabs a basket of one of the sizzling things off the long table and heads for the back room. The daemon herds her along. “What’s a cheeseburger,” he mutters under his breath as they go. “Hippie flaxseed useless abusive . . . this is America . . .” 11 follows him, baffled.

 

 

In the morning, Will isn’t there.

Cinhelm hops nervously. “Sometimes, Jonathan . . .” Joyce says, flapping her hands.

“You know, I know about Lonnie,” Jonathan says, unable to stop himself. “You could report him.”

“I’m not going to report your dad,” Joyce says, going toward the telephone.

“Then don’t—don’t complain about it when I try to help us out.” Jonathan pushes his chair in roughly and heads for the door.

“You know what would help?” Cinhelm says. “Actually being home when you say you’re going to be home.”

Jonathan slams the door.

 

 

Will isn’t at the Wheelers’.

 

 

Will isn’t at any of his other friends’ houses either.

 

 

Will isn’t at school.

 

 

Will isn’t at the library.

 

 

Will isn’t at the hospital.

 

 

They begin to search the woods. No one talks about dragging the lake. Not yet.

 

 

“It’s my fault,” Jonathan whispers to Filomena. “If I had come home earlier—if I hadn’t stayed with Hank—”

Filomena doesn’t say anything.

 

 

Cheeseburgers exceed 11’s expectations by more than two hundred percent. 11 watches Benny make them with his own hands, one after another. She eats until she almost vomits, but vomiting is not permitted, so she does not vomit.

“What is it?” 11 asks to distract herself, pointing at the daemon.

“You don’t know what a daemon is?” Benny asks, taking on a look of near panic.

“What kind,” 11 clarifies. Benny’s face uncreases in relief.

“Ah. She’s a foxhound. How about yours?”

11 flicks through the animals she knows. She picks the smallest one. “A mouse.”

Benny looks amused. “A mouse, huh? She shy?”

11 inclines her head.

There is a knock at the back door. 11 stills. She reaches out, but the person on the other side of the door has a mind like a frozen pond. A trained mind.

“Benny, don’t go,” she whispers.

Benny shakes his head at her. “I’ll just be a minute. Don’t run off.”

11 tries to hold him back, but she’s shaking. She retreats slowly into the kitchen. Two men are there, both with daemons that look like the foxhound, but not as nice.

 _I don’t want to hurt you,_ 11 thinks loudly at them. They reach for her. She sends a wave toward them, making them slide backward a few inches. They lunge again.

Behind her, she hears a thump and then the soft non-sound of Dust rising.

11 breaks their necks.

Her face is wet when she heads out into the night, but it’s OK. It’s raining.

 

 

The three boys are her age. 11 used to imagine other children, after 10 and 9 went away. For a moment, she thinks she dreamed them, but they all have daemons on their shoulders, pointy ones with glossy black all over their small bodies. Children don’t have daemons.

“Where’s her daemon,” says one of the boys urgently. “Guys, she doesn’t have one.”

Her shirt is plastered to her skin. 11 can’t stop jolting every few seconds. Her fingertips are on fire.

“Don’t be stupid,” the one with the missing teeth says. He walks around her, shining his flashlight. 11 turns slightly, but then she almost falls down. “I’m sure it’s right . . .” He stops as he completes the circle. “Uh . . . guys?”

The one with enormous eyes looks straight at her. “Are you a ghost?”

11 doesn’t know what a ghost is. She is exhausted with all the words she doesn’t know. _Help me_ , 11 thinks at him. He doesn’t seem to pick up on it. _Help me_ , she tries again, louder.

“I don’t like this,” says the first one.

“I don’t think she’s a ghost,” says the one with the eyes. “I think she needs help.”

 _Yes,_ 11 thinks in relief. She presses into his mind to thank him, but the swirl of images she gets in response surprises her. He’s looking for someone. A boy. The boy she saw on the way to the woods.

“Your friend,” she says, wanting to put him at ease. He looks so worried. “He’s here.”

Then the world goes black and the ground comes up to meet her.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Filomena is a red-breasted nuthatch. http://www.wilddelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/RedBreastedNuthatch01.jpg
> 
> Cinhelm is a Patagonian mara. http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/patagonian-mara-dolichotis-patagonum-argentina-picture-id168154072?s=170667a


	2. Chapter 2

Benny Hammond killed himself the night before, and both his fry cooks saw him take a boy about Will’s age into the back room yesterday.

Joyce’s hands shake when she closes the door behind Hopper and Diarte.

“Mom,” Jonathan says into the silence. “Benny wouldn’t hurt a fly. You know that.”

“People can surprise you,” Joyce says, staring into the middle distance. “You know, everybody in this world makes the mistake of thinking that just because you can see someone’s daemon, you know what they’re capable of. John Wayne Gacy Jr. had a katydid daemon.”

“Gacy wore a dead katydid around his neck,” Jonathan says, going to the refrigerator to get the eggs. She needs to eat something. “He had a human daemon.”

“Well, did anybody know that? No. They just saw what they saw.”

“We’re not hungry,” Cinhelm adds, noticing Jonathan at the stove.

“You have to eat, Mom. Aren’t you planning to put up fliers?”

She puts her head in her hands. Cinhelm leaps up to sit on her lap and she reaches a hand down to pull on his ears, hard enough to look like it hurts. A nervous habit; Jonathan hasn’t seen her do it since Lonnie moved out. “I made copies last night. You can put some up at the school. I’ll do some more today.”

“How much did they cost?”

“Jonathan . . .”

She’s silent as he places the eggs in front of her, slides a ten-dollar bill under her limp left hand.

 

 

11 wakes up in a room she doesn’t recognize. The three boys are crowded around her. Their daemons have changed somehow. The one with the missing teeth pokes her in the leg. She flinches, and so does he.

“She’s awake,” says the boy in the green jacket.

“What’s your name?” asks the one with the eyes.

11 holds out her wrist.

“Your name’s Eleven?” asks Green Jacket skeptically.

“How’d you get a tattoo,” the other one breathes.

“I’m Mike,” says the one with the eyes. He points at his daemon, which 11 identifies as a cat. “This is Tuilelaith. You’re Eleven?”

11 nods.

“Okay.” He looks uncomfortable with her name for some reason. “Maybe we could call you El. Is that OK? El?”

El. She nods. Yes. El.

“OK. This is Dustin, and that’s Gelasia—”

“Hi,” Dustin and Gelasia say at the same time. El doesn’t know what Gelasia is. Something like a rat, but longer.

“—and that’s Lucas and Ouida.” Green Jacket just stares at her. His daemon looks like it is wearing a jacket just like him.

“Make her tell us where Will is,” Dustin says.

“Make her tell us why she doesn’t have a damn daemon!” Lucas exclaims. He looks at El. “Where are you hiding it?”

El doesn’t know what to say.

“Maybe she doesn’t have a soul,” Dustin says. He doesn’t look upset by this possibility.

“She could be a witch,” Mike says.

Lucas gives Mike a disgusted look. “Witches aren’t real.”

“Well, if you have a better idea, Mr. Sinclair,” Dustin says.

They all look at her. El stands up and takes off the yellow shirt that Benny gave her, then makes a slow spin. When she’s facing them again, she realizes they’re all covering their eyes with their backs to her, and two of the daemons have turned into little fat rat-things with no eyes.

“What the fuuuuck,” Lucas breathes at Mike.

“Uh, El?” Mike asks. “Could you put your shirt back on, please?”

She does, and they all turn around again.

“Jesus Christ,” Dustin says. “Jesus shitting Christ.”

El stares at him.

“OK, so you don’t have a daemon,” Mike says. “Did you . . . use to have a daemon?”

She shakes her head.

“You were born without one?”

She shrugs. “I thought . . . when I was grown up.”

“You thought you’d get one when you were grown up? Didn’t you see other kids with daemons?”

El shakes her head.

“She’s probably some kind of escaped psychopath,” Lucas says. “They probably kept her in solitary this whole time.”

“And I’m the crazy one for suggesting it’s witches?” Mike says. “They don’t keep kids in solitary, Lucas.”

El can’t stand it. “I don’t hurt,” she whispers. _I don’t want to hurt you._ The crack as their bones snapped. She shakes her head. “I don’t hurt,” she repeats. _Not anymore._

“Oh, great,” Dustin says, throwing his hands up. “She swears she won’t hurt us.”

 _“Where is Will,”_ Lucas demands, getting close to her face. El jumps.

“Stop scaring her!” Mike exclaims. “Look, you can stay here tonight. You can stay in the fort, OK?” He points at the little shelter made of blankets in the corner. “My mom won’t even know you’re here. We can call your parents in the morning.” His daemon goes and curls up in the blankets, apparently as a demonstration.

“You’re going to let a strange naked chick stay in your basement?” Lucas asks.

“Well, she’s not naked anymore!” Mike says, his face turning red.

“Don’t. Call,” El says. The little plastic figures on the table behind them tremble, but none of the boys seem to notice.

“Don’t call your parents?” Mike asks. “Why not? Are you in trouble?”

El nods. She tries to send him the image of the two men with guns in their belts. But he just looks puzzled at the eye contact. Behind him, Dustin unzips his backpack and takes out a framed photograph.

“Do you know where this kid is, for real?” Dustin asks, shoving the photograph in her face. “And are you a ghost.”

El takes the photo from him and holds it, studying Will’s face. It’s the same boy she saw before, just outside the woods. She taps his face. “He’s trapped.”

“Trapped where?” Lucas asks.

“The other place,” El says. She sends them all images, but they don’t seem to receive them. She scans their minds; confusion, worry. Can’t they talk without talking? What’s wrong with them?

She’d thought the Mike one had heard her before, but maybe it had been a fluke.

“ _What_ other place?” Dustin demands.

El looks over their shoulders, desperate to make them understand. On the table, among the plastic figurines, is a monster with two heads and many tentacles. Close enough. She makes it drift toward them.

The boys’ eyes follow hers, then widen. Dustin stumbles backward into Lucas.

El drops the figurine into her palm and holds it out for them to examine. “The place with the monster.”

 

 

Lonnie gets a dispensation from the government to maintain Tzefanyah’s tank, but Jonathan can tell by his breath he’s been spending it on beer.

Will isn’t there. Lonnie is full of tells, especially drunk, and his lack of concern for Will is genuine. He’s not hiding anything.

“In case you and Fanny forgot what he looks like,” Jonathan says as he’s leaving, slapping a flier into Lonnie's chest.

“You call her by her name,” Lonnie snaps. “Hey, Filomena! Fil!”

Filomena’s head jerks to look at him. Jonathan wants to stop her, but he doesn’t want Lonnie to see him fighting with his daemon. She always falls for this shit.

“You ever want to come over sometime, you just give Johnny a pull,” Lonnie says. Jonathan starts walking back to the car, fast. “He can’t stop you if you really want to come! I know you miss me!” Lonnie yells after them.

“I don’t miss him,” Filomena says quietly in the car, once they’re on the highway.

“Yes you do,” Jonathan tells her, gripping the steering wheel. “You always look.”

“What’s to miss?” Filomena mumbles. They drive back to Hawkins in silence.

 

 

Joyce’s car is in the driveway when he gets home, and Jonathan can’t stand the thought of both of them sitting around waiting for Will, so he takes his camera out to the woods. Maybe he will see something the rest of them missed.

Instead he sees Nancy Wheeler.

She’s screaming in the pool, clinging to the edge to stay close to her goat daemon as—goose daemon, too much hair—Steve Harrington splashes her. Nancy’s friend with the red hair hangs back, and Steve Harrington’s friend Tommy and his girlfriend Carol pound beers.

Only this morning Nancy had come up to him and said “It sucks,” meaning, apparently, “The fact that your brother is missing and Burger Benny might have abducted him and the whole thing is your fault for being too fucking queer to notice really sucks balls, man.” It was sweet. Nancy’s sweet.

He didn’t think she was the kind of girl who went to Steve Harrington’s parties.

He takes pictures. He’s been making a yearbook. Things I Didn’t Do in High School.

Upstairs, Nancy takes off her shirt. Jonathan lowers his camera. He can see the goat settle into the corner of the room. Cuddy. He should just admit that he knows the name of Nancy Wheeler’s daemon. He’s known it since they were twelve.

Filomena chirps a little. She doesn’t usually make bird noises.

On the diving board below, Nancy’s red-haired friend dangles her feet in the water, holding her bandaged hand. Her daemon emerges for the first time from her collar and plops into the water between her feet. Jonathan thinks it’s a frog.

“Stop looking,” Filomena tells him.

She’s right. Jonathan gets up and heads home.

 

 

He doesn’t know what he expected, but it isn’t his mother sitting in the living room with all the lamps they own, both of his stereos, the microwave, and the telephone attached to three power strips in the middle of the room.

“Mom?” he says, his voice unsteady.

Joyce looks up. Her face is greasy and she’s bitten her nails bloody. “Jonathan! Look. Blink once for yes, twice for no,” she says, apparently to the mass of devices.

“What—”

“I think it’s Will,” his mother whispers. “I think he’s talking to me. Look, I—I asked the deck, because I think it helps—”

She’s holding her old pack of tarot cards. Jonathan’s stomach hurts. Filomena blurts, “You know that stuff is full of crap.”

Cinhelm shakes his head.

“I know that’s what you think, Jonathan, but please hear me out,” Joyce says. She shuffles the deck and pulls out a card. “Will,” she says. “Will, are you there?”

The bulbs in the lamps waver, and Jonathan’s stereo suddenly turns on at top volume. He hurries to shut it off.

“Mom, it’s just a power surge. _You_ caused it, with this,” he says, waving his hand at the pile. “You’re going to set the house on fire.”

She ignores him. “Where are you?” Cinhelm pulls a card off the top of the pile and Joyce flips it over. “The Moon,” she reads. “The moon. Baby, I don’t know what that means. Can you explain?”

She pulls another card. “8 of Swords. OK, you’re stuck there. Are you OK?”

9 of Wands. “No,” Joyce says, her hands trembling. She drops the card. “No, he’s not OK.”

The lamps blink again, this time twice.

“No,” Joyce says. “No what?”

The stereo blares. Jonathan can’t turn it off this time. The microwave is on. “Mom,” he says. “What’s going on?”

The telephone rings. They both stare at it. At last, Jonathan snatches it up. “Hello?” he shouts over the music.

A long burst of static, then a crackling noise. “bbchhrunnbbhh,” says the telephone.

“Will?” Jonathan asks.

“Will?” Joyce cries. “Will, is that you?”

The stereo suddenly bursts into static as well; it’s deafening. The lights are going wild, like they’re at a disco. “CHHHBBBBCHHH RUN. RUN.”

“I think it said to run,” Jonathan says, looking at Joyce.

The wallpaper bulges.

They run.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopper's daemon, Diarte, is a bobcat: http://www.nature.org/cs/groups/webcontent/@photopublic/documents/media/bobcat-640x400.jpg
> 
> Lonnie's daemon, Tzefanyah, is a longnose gar: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ckBlasgNSzg/SlaFGzNYR0I/AAAAAAAANM0/qDFxDrI5PMM/s400/Lepisosteus+osseus.JPG
> 
> Barb's daemon, Horaz, is a glass frog: http://amphibianrescue.org/amphibianwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Granular-glass-frog-Cochranella-granulosa-Kristen-Martyn-Flickr.jpg


	3. Chapter 3

El dreams.

Summer. Three times a week they place her in front of the window, naked. It’s because, as Papa told her, skin needs sun to live. It was a mistake for them to do this, an accidental kindness. The window is how she learned to desire.

After the window, a small animal nearly identical to one of the scientists’ daemons. Papa calls it a mouse.

“Remove the Dust from the mouse, please, 11,” he says through the speaker.

All the scientists have goggles on so that they can see what she can see.

It is much harder to do with a living thing than with a radio. She tries fifty-one times in a row before she watches the Dust explode and the mouse stop moving.

Next she learns “rat.”

Papa teaches her “cat” when the leaves are falling off the trees.

But the cat can speak. It sounds just like 9 used to when she had a nightmare.

She can’t kill it.

No. She won’t kill it.

“Are you OK?”

It’s Mike, leaning over her. Tuilelaith is on his head, having turned into a funny-looking little brown thing.

“What kind?” El asks, pointing.

He feels around his head, then brightens when his fingers brush Tuilelaith. “Oh! Right now she’s a toad.”

“Why?”

“Why is she a toad?” He shrugs. “I guess she just felt like being a toad.”

“How?”

“You mean how can she change?”

El nods.

“All kids’ daemons can change. They usually settle into their real forms when you’re twelve or so. Mom says it could happen next year. Nancy didn’t settle until she was thirteen and the whining, Jesus.” Mike catches her trying to process all this information and says, “Oh. Right. Nancy’s my sister,” as if that should clear everything up. “Eggo?” he adds, when she still doesn’t reply.

El frowns—what?—and Mike hands her a small springy disc.

“Put it in your mouth,” he says.

She does. Then she stuffs the whole thing in. He laughs. “Pretty good, right?”

Her full mouth saves her from asking the question that’s been pressing on her since the night before.

_Is there anyone else like me?_

She doesn’t want to know the answer.

“I have to go to school now. Don’t leave the house, OK?”

 _Toad_ , she thinks. _Toad, foxhound, mouse, rat, cat._

 

 

Jonathan makes Joyce promise not to use the cards again unless he’s there.

 

 

“Don’t develop them,” Filomena says.

“I just want to see,” Jonathan mumbles.

“You _have_ seen.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Jonathan knows Filomena understands. You can see things in a photograph that existed only for a split second, invisible in the normal flow of time.

But Carol and her fox daemon see him developing the photographs, and she tells Steve Harrington, and the next thing Jonathan knows his camera’s smashed and Nancy’s looking at him like he’s a wad of spit on the ground.

 

 

“You’ve only been feeding her Eggos?” Dustin asks.

“She loves Eggos,” Mike says defensively.

“Mike, what do you think girls eat?” Dustin asks. “Does Nancy survive on Eggo alone? No?” He turns to El, exaggerating his words. “Do . . . _you_. . . want . . . a _sandwich_?”

El stares at him, bewildered.

“Just give her the sandwich, Dustin,” Mike snaps.

Dustin hands her the sandwich and El takes a careful bite.

“That’s egg salad,” Dustin says proudly as El devours it. “Protein.”

“Give me one of those,” Lucas says, snapping his fingers. Dustin tosses it to him.

“We asked Mr. Clarke about other dimensions today,” Mike tells her. “He said theoretically a disruption in the space-time continuum could create a hole or whatever. Do you think that’s how the Demogorgon got through?”

El glances around at their waiting faces. “I only ever saw it in the tank.”

“The tank?” Lucas repeats. Ouida slithers up his arm and rests her head on his shoulder. “Like that?” He points at Mike’s round glass bowl. A small yellow animal navigates the single plastic tree inside.

El nods. “But for children.” She closes her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest to illustrate. They are all wearing unreadable expressions when she opens her eyes. El points. “What kind?”

“Snake,” Mike says distractedly.

She points again.

“Fish. But that’s not a daemon. It’s just a regular animal.”

“I know.”

“How do you—never mind. How do we find the opening?”

El shakes her head.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Lucas explodes. “I told you, she’s making the whole thing up.”

“Oh yeah? Then how did she make the Demogorgon fly, genius?” Dustin asks.

“I don’t know! But it makes a lot more sense to me that whoever took her”—Lucas gestures and Ouida puffs up into something with little pins all over it—“also took Will, and that’s where she saw him, in some psycho’s basement. Not in a child-size aquarium, and not in an alternate dimension. In which case we should be calling the police and letting them question her before Will ends up dead.”

 _“Don’t. Call,”_ El says. Benny on the phone while she ate her cheeseburger. The thump; the Dust rising.

The windows rattle and Mike’s fishbowl slides to the edge of the dresser.

“Don’t kill Lovelace!” Mike cries, running to stop its progress.

El stops, horrified.

“Look,” Dustin says, “I think Lucas is just a dedicated believer in Occam’s Razor. Now, El, you’ve got to accept that your story sounds a little bit cuckoo. I’ve got an open mind, but I’m an unusual man. So if you could provide us with a little bit of proof . . .”

“Like for instance, you could make me fly,” Gelasia puts in. She looks like a fat striped cat, but she has tiny black hands like a person.

“You already can fly,” Dustin says. “When you’re not too lazy.”

“All that flapping,” Gelasia says. “To be honest, it’s a lot of effort.”

“Guess we know who’s never going to settle as a phoenix,” El says in an imitation of Lucas’s voice.

Lucas’s head whips toward her.

“What the fuck?” El continues. “Is that what I’m—stop. A duck. The number five. A chessboard. Stop!”

“Stop!” Lucas blurts a half second behind her.

“Were you _reading his mind_?” Gelasia exclaims.

“That was amazing,” Dustin says.

“It’s too dangerous,” El says.

“Mind-reading?” Mike asks faintly, clutching his fishbowl to his chest, which has tilted violently to one side in his distraction.

“The opening,” El says. Dr. Pete screaming.

“Well, then we have to protect Will!” Dustin says, leaping up.

“Please, El,” Mike says. “It’s important. Will’s our friend. If he’s in danger, we have to find him.”

Lucas finally lets go of the door handle. He clears his throat. “The compasses would show it. If there was a disturbance in the electromagnetic field.”

“Do you think that could lead us to where Will is?” Mike asks El.

She swallows. “You could die,” she whispers.

“Some things are worth dying for,” Mike says firmly. “Lucas, where’s your compass?”

 

 

“Barb is missing,” Nancy blurts when Jonathan opens the door. “I saw her in your photos. I think you were the last one who saw her.”

He steps out onto the porch and closes the door carefully behind him. No need for Nancy and Cuddy to see the mass of lamps and stereos.

“Look,” she says, thrusting the photo of the red-haired girl on the diving board into his hands. Cuddy hangs back. “Right there.”

He looks. There’s a gray, long shape hovering above Barb. Then there’s just an empty pool.

“It could just be distortion of some kind,” Jonathan says. Filomena hops down his arm to get a better view.

“They said it might have been an animal that took Will,” Nancy says. “But that doesn’t look like an animal to you, does it?”

 _Maybe Barb just ran away_ , Jonathan thinks. Then he thinks about how many times that’s been said to him lately. He shuts his mouth.

“Steve doesn’t believe me,” Nancy says. Her mouth tightens at the corners.

“Nancy,” Jonathan says. She looks up. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” she says, then corrects herself: “Well, it’s not OK. But . . .” She trails off, apparently unable to think of a mitigating factor.

He hunches his shoulders. “I only meant to take pictures of where Will disappeared. But I heard you in the pool, and you looked like . . . I mean, I’d never seen you look so . . .” Filomena flies in circles around his head. “I just wanted to understand why you looked like that. The photographs help. Help me understand things.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Nancy says. “I just wanted to know if this could be some kind of mistake when you developed it, or if it really is a photograph of . . . something.”

She and Cuddy pin him with identical eerie gazes.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Jonathan says. “I think I should tell you about something really weird that happened to me and my mom last night.”

 

 

The boys and El crunch through the leaves on the path toward Will’s house from Mike’s. El is wearing a blonde wig and carrying Mike’s mom’s Plexiglas travel case. Inside is a cricket, hopping from one side to the other as fast as El can blink.

_Mouse. Rat. Cat._

The compasses wobble mostly consistently in the direction of Will’s house.

“This is where they found his bike,” Lucas mumbles.

El can’t speak. They’re getting closer. She feels the Dust thinning.

_Foxhound. Toad._

They are almost upon the house when the compasses twist violently to one side.

“The shed,” Dustin whispers.

“They already searched in there,” Lucas says.

El breathes in and out too quickly.

_Snake. Fish._

Mike opens the door of the shed.

There’s no Dust in there at all.

“I don’t see anything,” Mike reports. “El, what’s wrong?”

She can’t explain.

“Guys. Look.” Dustin crawls out from under the worktable and lifts up his hand. It’s covered in something sticky.

_Mouse. Rat. Cat. Foxhound—_

“I think there’s something under there.”

He brings out an object the size of his forearm, covered in something that looks like snot.

Dustin clears the snot away, cringing. They all lean in.

“What kind?” El asks.

“A rabbit,” Mike whispers, sounding choked. “Astrea. That’s Will’s daemon.”

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Nancy blinks. “I mean, it’s hard to believe,” she says slowly.

“Yeah.” Jonathan exhales a laugh. “I don’t know what happened. All I know is what I saw.”

Cuddy fixes him with those unnerving, wide-set orange eyes.

“I believe you,” Nancy says at last. “I think.”

He looks at her. It feels as intimate as holding her hand.

“I want to look for it,” Nancy says firmly. “If we can find wherever it’s going, its . . . den or whatever, that’s where we’ll find Barb and your brother.”

Filomena twitches on his shoulder. “OK,” Jonathan says, suddenly energized. “OK.”

He gets to his feet and leans into the house. “Mom?” he calls. “I’m going to Nancy Wheeler’s house to study.”

He and Nancy walk their bikes straight into the woods.

 

 

It was dusk when they entered the shed. When they emerge, it's night. It makes the shed feel like another world, a dream state from which they have somehow extracted a living, breathing rabbit. El wonders if she could do this with other things, if the only thing preventing her from dreaming up a cheeseburger on those nights when dinner didn't come was that she hadn't known to wish for one.

She hadn't known to wish for a lot of things.

Dustin carries Astrea cradled in his arms, wrapped in Lucas's green jacket. They make their way slowly around to the front door. El can see Astrea’s small side moving rapidly with the beating of her rabbit heart.

It’s the quietest she’s ever seen the three boys.

Mike steps forward and knocks on the door.

“Mrs. Byers?” he starts when she opens the door, but her eyes flick immediately to Dustin’s arms and she lets out a kind of wail.

“Where’s Will?” she asks, brushing past them to run into the yard. Her daemon follows her on its spindly legs. “Will? Will?”

“Mrs. Byers!” Mike calls. “Will’s not here.”

“He must be here,” Mrs. Byers says. “That’s Astrea, that’s his little daemon, he can’t be far. Will!” she shrieks.

“We found her in the shed,” Dustin says softly. “She’s not awake.”

“Don’t you see?” Mike calls to her. “It means he’s alive.”

She turns to him, her eyes hanging huge in her face. “But where is he,” she asks again raggedly.

“He’s trapped,” says El. “Mike is going to help him.”

“Trapped where?” Mrs. Byers runs to El and grabs her shoulders, hard. “You know where he is?”

“She’s sort of psychic,” Dustin says.

“Mrs. Byers,” Mike says, “can we bring Astrea inside?”

It takes a moment for Mrs. Byers to hear him. At last she and her daemon nod.

The Byerses’ house is squat and dark, with items strewn everywhere. Mrs. Byers clears off a stack of papers on the kitchen table and motions for them to sit down. Her daemon leaps into her lap. Dustin places Astrea gently in the center of the table. Then he takes one of the Oreos from the package next to her.

“Are you kidding me right now?” Lucas hisses at him.

“It’s dinnertime,” Dustin says. “I’ve literally never missed dinner in my entire life.”

“There’s a place,” El says, scanning Mrs. Byers’s mind. “It looks the same, but it is not the same.”

Mrs. Byers just stares at her with those white eyes.

“Like a mirror,” El tries again.

Mrs. Byers snorts a humorless laugh and El jumps. “What do you mean,” Mrs. Byers says, “like, Will went—“ She waves her hands. “He went through the looking glass?”

El doesn’t know what to say. Mike leans over. “Do you know what that is?” he whispers. El shakes her head. “Well, me neither,” he says, his capabilities as a translator apparently exhausted.

“Who is this girl, Mike,” Mrs. Byers says. “Dustin? Lucas? What’s going on?”

“We found her in the woods,” Mike says. “When we were looking for Will.”

“When you were looking for—Mike, you boys shouldn’t be wandering around, not with that thing on the loose!” She looks ready to tear her hair out. She’s pulling hard on her daemon’s ears instead.

“The monster,” El says. “Will is hiding from it. He’s stuck in the mirror.”

Mrs. Byers doesn’t speak. Astrea slumbers on the table between them.

Someone bangs on the door.

 

 

“Why don’t you ever talk at school?” Nancy asks suddenly as they’re nearing the place where Jonathan took the photos.

He shrugs, nearly dislodging Filomena. “No one to talk to.”

“No one in the whole school?”

“Like who? Tommy and Carol?”

Her mouth twists up. “I mean . . .”

“I used to talk to Sean Wilson, but he graduated last year, so.” He shoves his bike over a rock.

“He’s still in town, isn’t he?”

Jonathan nods. “I see him sometimes.”

“I used to see you when you were picking up Will from our house. You always looked really mad. I was kind of scared of you,” Nancy confesses. Cuddy sends him a walleyed glance from her other side.

He doesn’t know what to say. At last he offers, “I would have talked to you, probably.”

“About what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would you have talked to me about?” The leaves crackle.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you talk to Sean about?”

Jonathan considers. Filomena hops onto his handlebars. “Music. Movies. Other places. Comic books.” He liked Sean partly because Sean only ever wanted to get high and talk about abstract concepts that had nothing to do with the actual events of their lives.

“Well, I’ve never read any comic books, but a lot of people like music and movies. I like those things. Unless you're one of those guys who--" Nancy's breath catches. Jonathan stops abruptly.

They’ve just rounded a stand of trees and come upon a clearing.

In the clearing several small animal bodies are lying dead on the ground. One of them has been ripped open. The wound steams in the chilly air.

 

 

El hides in the bathroom. The door is locked, but she can hear the conversation. She casts out, feeling—the intruder is a man, older, heavy with something he has to do. His mind is untrained. He’s not looking for her.

She relaxes, but only a little. Mrs. Byers might tell him she’s here, and then she’ll have to run again.

“Hi, Joyce.”

“Hi, Hopper.” She’s met him at the door; the boys are still in the kitchen.

“I . . . Are you alone? I have to tell you . . .”

“Did something happen?” Mrs. Byers sounds exhausted.

“We, uh. We found his body. At the quarry today. They’re not positive, but they’re pretty sure that’s Will. They want you to come down tomorrow morning to do the ID.”

“That’s not him.”

“Joyce—”

“Will is alive. Will is alive. I know it. I know it. I—” Footsteps as she heads to the kitchen, then back out.

“What is this?”

“This is Will’s daemon. His friends found it today in the shed.”

“In the shed? Joyce . . .”

_“What?”_

He’s trying to be delicate, but he does not have a delicate mind. “No daemon can survive that long separated like that. That’s just—it doesn’t happen.”

“A lot of strange things have happened to me lately, Hop. Stranger than my son leaving his daemon behind.”

“Are you sure it’s not—I mean, maybe it’s a . . .” He sighs. “That just looks like a rabbit to me, Joyce. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Byers’s mind flares. “Do you think I don’t know my own son’s daemon?” she hisses. “Do you? If Glaedvin came back to you tomorrow, wouldn’t you be able to tell it from a damn rabbit?”

She’s hurt him. El retreats from his mind, afraid of being sucked in. His sadness goes a long way down.

 

 

“It’s eating them,” Nancy whispers.

“Nancy,” Jonathan says urgently, “it’s probably still around here. I think that thing is a skunk. That’s a pretty fucking big animal to kill, and we can still breathe, which means it snuck up on it. We should—”

She crouches. “These other two. They’re not hurt.”

“They’re dead,” Jonathan says.

“Yeah, but other than that. There aren’t any marks on them.” Nancy looks closer. “How did it do that?”

Filomena makes a tiny noise and skims down his leg to the ground. “The grass is dead,” Jonathan realizes, spinning in a slow circle. “It looks like someone had a fire here or something.”

“And the tree,” Nancy says, crawling toward it. “The tree is dead.”

He kneels down behind her, looking at the sticky substance smeared all over the trunk. “I think there’s a—”

Behind him, a slow clicking noise sets the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.

He turns.

“Nancy,” he says so quietly he can barely hear himself, “hide.”

 

 

Hopper has left, and El comes back out. She passes a mass of things on the floor—a telephone, lamps, a stereo. The lamps light up as she passes. El pauses, then crosses back toward the bathroom. The lamps flare again.

“Is he talking to you?” Mrs. Byers comes running in from the other room.

“Who?”

“Will. I made a system—” Mrs. Byers nods at the lamps. “One blink for yes, two for no. And the cards.”

A pile of cards with strange images on them on the floor. They seem to flicker as El looks at them.

“Do you know how to read tarot cards?”

El shakes her head, but she gets down on her knees in front of the cards anyway, feeling drawn to them.

The boys drift in from the kitchen, still talking about the conversation with Hopper. Their daemons are all the same, something that often happens when they’re not fighting. This time they are small and brown, covered in soft fur.

Her hand darts out and she picks a card.

The Ace of Swords.

“A new idea?” Mrs. Byers says. “Honey, do you have something to show us? Will?”

El focuses. “No,” she says. Her voice drops. “Hello, Eleven.”

“Whoa,” Dustin breathes.

“El, what are you doing?” Mike, from the corner.

El looks at him. “The cards said hello."

“Ask Will where he is!” Mrs. Byers says, clutching her daemon.

El picks up another card. Focuses. “It’s not Will.”

“What do you mean it’s not Will?”

It takes five cards to answer her question. El scrutinizes them. “The connection is bad,” she says. “I think they said . . . they are daemons. But not of people. Of the universe.”

“Did anyone give her any mushrooms, by any chance,” Lucas says, not quite under his breath. "Think back." 

El exhales. “I can’t get any more.”

“I don’t know what that m-means,” Mrs. Byers says. “I just want to find my son. Ask them how I can find my son.”

This takes twelve cards. El’s head hurts. “Your . . . something. Theologians. What is that?” She looks around, but nobody answers. “They are ripping holes in the world. That’s where the Dust is going. The Dust is of concern to them. Your son went through one of the holes. No . . .” She pauses. “Sons. Your sons. Do you have another son?”

“Jonathan?” Mrs. Byers’s voice trembles. “He’s at the Wheelers’.”

“No.” El looks up. “He’s in the mirror.”

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note this chapter contains descriptions of violence and references to past violence against children.

“Where are we?” Nancy whispers.

It’s not cold. That’s the first thing Jonathan notices. On the other side of the tree, it’d been see-your-breath weather. Now it’s so neutral as to be almost temperatureless. And yet—there’s snow.

No. Not snow. He reaches out a hand. More like dust.

Something else feels wrong. He reaches automatically for Filomena and touches empty air.

“Filomena?” he says under his breath.

“What?” Nancy says.

He looks around as best he can, crouched behind the tree. Filomena isn’t there. Jonathan pats down his clothes.

“Where’s Cuddy?” he says, checking Nancy.

She swipes out a hand to her left, then turns. “Cuddy?” she whispers. “Cuddy?”

No one answers.

“They’re on the other side,” Jonathan says. “We left them there somehow.”

“How?” Nancy asks, eyes wide. “We aren’t—this isn’t— _are we dead?”_

“Shh,” Jonathan says. “I don’t think so. I think we disappeared.”

“What do you mean disappeared?” Nancy’s panicking; her fingers are going to rip through his jacket.

“Like the animal,” Jonathan says. “Whatever it is. It was there one second, and then it wasn’t. What if this is where it goes?”

“But we’re still in the woods.” She looks around, frowning.

Jonathan points. “Where’s the skunk?”

There’s nothing on the ground where the skunk used to be.

“It’s still here,” Nancy says, her voice even quieter. “It dragged it off.”

“And the others too? That fast?”

“I don’t think we’re dealing with a f—a flipping coyote,” Nancy snaps. Her tone is shrill, harsh. “This was stupid, this was so stupid,” she mumbles to herself.

“Do you have a knife or anything?”

She shakes her head, holds up the flashlight, which blinks on weakly, then burns out.

“I have a penknife.” He shows her. “We’re going to get out of this, OK? It’s going to be fine.”

A crackling noise sounds from inside the tree. They both freeze.

“We have to move,” Jonathan whispers. “On three, OK? We’re going to stand up, and then we’re going to walk around the tree, back to back. You just keep your back on mine and go where I go, OK?”

“OK,” she whispers. “Do you think Cuddy is still alive?”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she says, the whites showing around her eyes.

He squeezes her hand and she jerks at the contact. “You’re alive. One, two . . . three.”

They stand up and walk back to back, like some eight-limbed creature. Around the tree, into the clearing. Jonathan glances around. Nothing. “Clear on your side?” he whispers.

He feels her pause. “I see something,” she says. “In the trees.”

He cranes his neck. It takes a moment, and then he sees it too: a little gold glimmer, fleeting, like a firefly. But it’s November.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“Me neither. It’s weird, right? That it’s not cold here?” Maybe it’s summer here. Maybe those are fireflies after all.

Another glimmer peeks out, then makes a brief arc over the trees into nothingness.

“Jonathan. Look.” She turns them slightly so that he can see. It’s hard to see beyond the dust, which turns everything vaguely gray, like a mist. Then he makes it out: it’s Steve Harrington’s house. The pool looks flat, two-dimensional, not the sublit green he remembers.

They hold hands, trying to be quiet as they pass over the leaves. Every once in a while, a gold glimmer will shoot by. Jonathan spots one underneath a bush, tiny, unmoving. He stares at it, but it never re-forms into a shape that makes sense. It’s just . . . there.

“How did you know Cuddy’s name?” Nancy asks after a few minutes.

“What?”

“You said, ‘Where’s Cuddy?’ How did you know his name?”

Jonathan feels his face heat. “I don’t know. I guess I heard you say it before.”

She gives him a sidelong glance. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again.

“It’s Cuidightheath,” she says, following an excruciating silence.

“Could-ja-have?” Jonathan repeats.

“His name,” Nancy says. “It’s Irish. It means helpful.”

Jonathan swallows. “That’s a good name.”

“What’s yours?” Nancy asks. “The bird?”

“Filomena,” Jonathan says, feeling naked. “She’s a nuthatch.”

Nancy nods. “She’s pretty.”

“Will—“ Jonathan wipes his nose—“Will used to call her a nutjob.”

Nancy laughs. “That sounds like something Mike would say.” She seems to become aware at the same time as Jonathan that they’re still holding hands. She glances at him—then lets go.

“Do you think there’s another exit around here?” Jonathan asks. “Where the animal went with your friend?”

“Maybe.” They make it onto the concrete next to the pool. There’s a huge mass of webbing and slime, like the stuff that was inside the tree. Jonathan squints at it. There’s something—someone—

He jerks Nancy back, but he’s too late. She screams.

“Barb!” she shrieks.

“Nancy,” he whispers, “Nancy, no, shhh—”

She’s not listening. “Barb!”

Nancy wrenches herself from his grasp and goes splashing down the pool steps into the water, clothes and all. Barb stares up from underwater, eyes clouded over underneath her broken glasses. Her skin has turned a deep, bruised color underneath the gray of the water, the bloated, delicate appearance of overripe fruit.

Her stomach is missing.

Nancy throws her arms around Barb’s body, drags it up out of its putrid pocket of the water. “Help me,” she says hoarsely. Jonathan’s just staring. He checks behind them—no monster.

A gold mass, bigger than all the others, goes hurtling by Jonathan’s shoulder as he makes his way to the edge of the pool. “Wha—” But it’s gone.

He has to focus.

For some reason he had expected Barb to burst at his touch. The fruit thing. But she’s stiff, the jerky consistency of arthritic muscles. They drag her by her armpits up the stairs and onto the side of the pool. She’s so heavy out of the water. They try to drag her back into the woods, toward the tree, but it’s slow going.

A clicking noise. Jonathan’s skin crawls.

“It’s here,” he whispers. “Nancy, it’s here.”

“Help me,” she snaps.

“No,” he says. “We have to go. We’ll come back for her.”

“You go.” She brushes Barb’s hair out of her eyes and takes the full weight of Barb’s body from him.

 _“No,”_ he insists, pulling her. “Nancy—”

The animal comes out from the woods. It’s like a man, but not. Its skin is the grayish pink of a hairless cat, and it has no face.

No—

It roars, and its face is a mouth, opening outward like a flower. Teeth all the way down its throat.

Nancy screams again and so does Jonathan, and then he’s forcing her, grabbing her by the jacket and dragging her at a run into the woods. The monster thunders behind them, and he doesn’t know how close it is—he can’t tell—

 _Will is dead,_ he thinks, and he’s suddenly horribly overcome with the reality of Will’s death, of his little brother, his fucking scaredy-cat little brother facing those teeth, how afraid he must have been, how much pain he must have been in—a bad death, not a death for a child, a baby, a little boy.

He shoves Nancy into the tree, and hears her strike her head against the entrance, a terrible hollow sound, but he pushes her forward anyway, and crawls in himself, not looking, not looking—her feet scrabble on the leaves outside, and then she sticks her hand back through and tugs him hard, nearly dislocating his shoulder—

He feels its breath on his ankle and kicks out, scraping its teeth—

And then Nancy tugs him through and he tumbles out into the cold November night on top of her, both of them soaked in pool water, slime, dirt, and Barb’s decay. They look into each other’s faces, mirrored horror.

The animal roars from inside the tree, but the opening is gone, leaving only a coating of slime on the trunk.

They’re safe.

Jonathan looks around. Filomena is on the ground next to him, unmoving. Cuddy lies nearby, just as still. He rolls off Nancy and touches Filomena gently with one finger. “Wake up,” he says, his voice gravelly.

She blinks, and Jonathan’s heart squeezes in relief. He feels different out here—it’s like he didn’t even notice until the feeling went away. A kind of emptiness, a nothingness. It’s gone now. Filomena’s awake.

“What the fuck is this.”

Steve’s voice is cold. Jonathan looks up. Steve Harrington is standing in front of him, his goose daemon’s neck feathers puffed out.

“Nancy? Are you good?”

Nancy’s clutching Cuddy, trembling all over. She doesn’t reply.

Jonathan raises his hand, holding Filomena in the other as he gets to his feet. “Steve, it’s—”

Steve punches him.

Jonathan falls, dropping Filomena. He scrabbles for her through his teary vision. “Fil! Fil—”

Steve climbs on his chest and punches him again, hard. “You fucking pervert,” he says. A pop. Blood fills Jonathan’s mouth. “I told you to stay away from her, but you didn’t—fucking—listen—”

Jonathan’s exhausted nerves light up with a kind of frayed fury. How many times has he been here, forced to listen to some man tell him what they think of him, when they don’t know the first thing about him.

He punches back, throws Steve off him. Steve is angry, but Jonathan’s angrier. _You don’t know what you got yourself into, you rich, spoiled, stupid motherfucker_ , he thinks, spitting out blood. _Let me show you how we do it in the Byers family._

Jonathan’s next punch takes all the air out of Steve’s lungs and he collapses on the ground. Jonathan gives him a black eye. Two black eyes. If he had a cigarette he’d put it out on Steve’s pretty face, complete the picture. He pins Steve’s arm to the ground, thinks about breaking it, and then Nancy screams directly into his ear,

_STOP IT_

He becomes dimly aware that Nancy has been screaming for a while now, and this is just the first time he’s heard her.

He freezes and Steve rolls away, moaning.

“What is wrong with you,” Nancy says, sobbing. Jonathan shrinks back, but she’s talking to Steve. “Jonathan saved my life.”

Steve shakes his head. “He was on you, Nancy, he was—he was trying to—”

“The thing that killed Barb,” Nancy spits. “It’s still out here. Jonathan saved me from that thing.”

“What thing?” Steve demands, looking around wildly. “Barb is dead?”

Jonathan feels around his mouth. No broken teeth, just a few cuts. His nose is still streaming blood and he presses his filthy coat sleeve to it—there’s no saving the coat anyway.

How will he buy another coat?

Maybe he can beg Lonnie for a spare.

Filomena hops onto his shoulder, unhurt.

“Jonathan, are you all right?” Nancy turns to him, but her eyes are scared and Cuddy takes a few halting steps backward when he sees Jonathan’s face.

He deserves it. His knuckles are split. That’s one of Jonathan’s first memories, sitting at the table watching Joyce bandage Lonnie’s hand. Now she’ll have to bandage his hand, too.

No, she won’t. He’ll bandage his own hand.

He gets to his feet, muscles aching, and grabs his bike. Dazedly, he notes that the skunk is back, and what’s left of the body is cold.

Steve and Nancy don’t even say anything as he pushes his bike as fast as he can. He feels their eyes on his back as he goes.

 

 

 

The door opens and a tall, lanky person lets himself in. He’s covered in dirt and something else. El scans his brain quickly. It’s crackly, disjointed. He’s ashamed of something, and sad, and scared. A flash of teeth. He’s seen it, the monster. He was in the mirror.

“Jonathan,” she says.

His eyes flick to her and confusion passes over his face.

Mrs. Byers jerks to her feet and flies to him, throwing her arms around him. _“Where have you been,”_ she gasps.

“In the mirror,” El says.

“What are you—what is this,” Mrs. Byers says, pulling away, examining his jacket. “What is that smell? Are you _bleeding?_   Don’t drip on the carpet. Take your coat off.”

He takes off his coat, and then his shoes and his pants. He’s standing in a threadbare shirt and boxers in the cold house as Mrs. Byers takes his ruined clothes into another room. “Who are you?” he croaks.

“That’s El,” Mike says for her. “It’s short for Eleven. She knows about Will.”

He shakes his head. “Is that what it’s called?” he asks, still focused on El. “The mirror?”

El nods.

“Did you go in the mirror?” Gelasia asks eagerly from Dustin’s head, sticking her neck out. El glances at Mike, but he’s looking away. Lucas leans over on her other side, surprising her, and whispers, “Iguana.”

Jonathan nods.

“What was it like?” Dustin and Lucas say at the same time.

Jonathan presses his lips together and looks at the carpet.

Mrs. Byers comes back, holding sweatpants. “Are you OK?” she asks, shining a little penlight at Jonathan’s face, checking his split lip. “Was it the . . . thing?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Did you see Will,” she asks, her voice cracking.

He shakes his head. “I saw Nancy’s friend,” he says laconically. “The one they said ran away.” He swallows, glances at the boys.

“Barb?” Mike asks. “Is she OK?”

“You guys should go home,” Jonathan says instead of answering. “I can drive you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mrs. Byers says. “I’ll drive them. You’ll come too. I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“Where does she live?” he asks, nodding at El.

“Where do you live, honey?” Mrs. Byers asks.

“In the fort!” Mike answers. “She really likes Eggos.”

“In the blanket fort?” Mrs. Byers asks. “In your basement? Oh, Mike.”

“I like the fort,” El whispers.

“You can stay here tonight, honey,” Mrs. Byers says. “We’ll make you up a cot, OK?”

She glances at Mike. “She likes the fort,” he insists to Mrs. Byers.

“Does your mom know she’s staying with you?”

He hesitates, and she shakes her head. “No. You can stay here, El, baby, OK?”

El swallows. She has to be brave. It’s not safe for Mike to let her live in his basement. Papa will find her eventually. She has to protect Mike and Dustin and Lucas.

“What—no!” Mike says, looking from her to Mrs. Byers.

“Mike,” El says, placing her hand on his shoulder. “It’s OK.”

“You didn’t use the cards again, did you?” Jonathan says suddenly, looking at the scatter of cards across the carpet.

Mrs. Byers stiffens. “The cards—like her,” she says, putting a hand on her daemon’s head. “They talked to her.”

“Will talked to her?” Jonathan asks, his voice taking on a new tone. “He’s alive?”

“He’s alive,” Lucas says. "We found Astrea."

“You found--" Jonathan shakes his head. "Where is he?"

“We asked,” Dustin says in a small voice. “It said a bunch of stuff about Dust and holes in the world and it said you were in the mirror with Will.”

“Dust?” Jonathan looks at her. “So you’ve seen it? That place?”

El nods.

“Ask it again,” Jonathan says. “Ask it where he is.”

Everyone looks at El. They are all wearing the same expression, a peculiar one. El thinks it is like hope and pity at the same time.

She crouches in front of the cards and closes her eyes. The cards seem to fly into her hands. There’s a pop of light, but she can’t tell if it’s on the outside, beyond her eyelids, or the inside, in her brain.

Seven of Cups. Knight of Pentacles. Eight of Pentacles. Three of Wands. Eight of Wands.

“Bad connection.” El opens her eyes. “We have to build a better machine,” she clarifies, pointing at the lamps and stereos. “Lucas will build it—”

“I will?” Lucas interjects.

El nods gravely. “With the device you steal from the school. The man ordered it for you.”

“The _ham radio?”_  Mike and Dustin say together.

“No,” Lucas says. “No no no no no, no way am I stealing the ham radio—that thing is worth as much as a microcomputer!”

“They will tell you how to build it,” El says.

“Build _what?”_ Mike asks.

She squints. “It’s called an . . . alethiometer.” She glances around, but nobody seems to know the word.

“And that’ll help us find Will?” Jonathan asks. “He’s still alive?”

El nods, then pauses. “Fast. They said to work fast. I think it means—”

“We don’t have much time,” Jonathan finishes for her.

Mrs. Byers presses her hands to her mouth.

“OK,” Mike says, his voice high. “We can steal the ham radio. What’s the big deal? It’s just money, right?” He trails off, huddling with Lucas and Dustin, their daemons matching once more. Mrs. Byers wraps Jonathan in a blanket and presses her forehead to his.

El turns her attention back to the cards. They hum at her, and one lamp flickers. _What does the monster want?_  she asks silently.

They are slow to answer the question. At last the radio burps a little static and a card falls into her hand.

[Justice.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/RWS_Tarot_11_Justice.jpg)

_It wants you, Eleven._

 

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

El watches Joyce from the cot next to the bed (“I’d say you could stay in Will’s room, but it bothers me enough having Jonathan so far away”). That’s Mrs. Byers’s name. Joyce. El heard it in her head.

Cinhelm sleeps beside her, folded up into a ball. Joyce’s limp hand brushes his side. Astrea is in the other room, protected by Jonathan’s body, Filomena puffed up on top of her.

Joyce had put blankets on the cot like it was nothing, given her sandwich after sandwich, rubbed her back as she ate. At first it felt sinister, but then—nothing happened. Joyce had fallen asleep next to El as if she weren’t afraid of her at all. Even though she’d _seen_ El talk to the cards.

She touched El just like she touched Jonathan. El had never seen it before. People didn’t touch children that way: gently, as if they were daemons.

“Do you love Will?” El had asked experimentally just before bed, as Joyce was looking at Astrea’s limp body with something El couldn’t read in her eyes.

“Yes,” Joyce had answered, and El saw it: flashes of Will as a baby, as a toddler screaming in the bath, as a quiet, withdrawn boy in the back of the car. Overlaid was a repetitive scene, a worry stone: Joyce making a grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich, flipping it in the pan, carrying it in to Will’s bedroom where he lay sick, surrounded by wadded-up tissues. She handed him the sandwich: triumph, satisfaction. She’d fed him. He would live. Again. The cheese, then tomatoes. The hiss of the butter on the pan. She’d fed him. He would live.

El had had to extract herself from the memory carefully. It was sticky. She understood how Joyce had ended up stuck inside it.

So that was her theory confirmed. Joyce wants to find Will, but not the way Papa wants to find El. Joyce just wants Will to live.

For the first time, it occurs to El that Papa must not care if she is safe. If he did, he wouldn’t make her do dangerous things.

She wonders why she’s never put that together before.

Joyce looks so much younger in her sleep, the lines on her face smoothed out. El has seen Will’s father in Joyce’s mind. So that’s four now—Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Will all have one mother, one father.

Does El have a mother?

El puts a cautious hand to her own face, feeling her features. She could get out of bed and ask the makeshift alethiometer. _Do I have a mother?_

She stays in bed, stiff-limbed, until she falls asleep.

 

 

Joyce bustles around the kitchen, putting bread in a machine (“toaster”; Mike told her, for the Eggo) and cracking eggs into the frying pan. “How did you sleep, El?”

El rubs her eyes, sitting down at the table. The smells woke her.

“I got worried about you last night,” Joyce says. “Looked like you were having a nightmare.” There’s a space in which Joyce seems to expect her to say something, but El doesn’t know what.

“Mike said you don’t have parents,” Joyce continues casually, setting a plate down in front of her and handing her a fork. “Is that true?”

El shakes her head. “Papa,” she says.

“You have a dad? Where’s he?”

“He doesn’t love me,” El says, taking a bite of toast. She’s never had bread like this, with butter on it. It makes bread taste even better than El knew it could.

Joyce stills. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

El looks at her. “I asked,” she says. “Last night.”

“You asked your dad? Oh, you mean me. You asked about Will.”

Cinhelm hops up onto the counter and moves the frying pan into the sink.

“You want him to be safe,” El says. “Love.”

“Yes,” Joyce says.

El stuffs her mouth full of eggs and swallows. “To Papa, I am a cat.” 

“A cat?” Joyce doesn’t understand.

A knock on the door. Cinhelm twitches.

El casts her mind out. “It’s Hop. Joyce. Don’t tell him.”

“Sweetie, I have to tell him you’re here,” Joyce says. “If you don’t want to go back to your dad, that’s OK, but he can help us find your mom.”

“I don’t have one,” El says, unsure if she’s lying.

“OK, well, we could get you into foster care,” Joyce says. “There are some really good people here in Hawkins. I’m sure we could find someone to take you in.”

“I can’t stay here?” Her eyes sting.

“Oh—” Joyce looks at the door, then back at El. “Not legally. I mean, I can’t take care of you.”

El rubs her palms over her face, desperate. “I can help you. I can talk to them.”

“I know you can,” Joyce says. “Look, why don’t you—”

The knock comes again.

“Why don’t you ask them if it’s safe to tell Hopper,” Joyce whispers quickly.

El hesitates, then slides off her chair.

“Joyce,” Hop says from the other side of the door. “Open the door. Come on.”

 _Will he tell Papa?_ El asks.

Two cards.

_Tell him of 10 and 9. Do not say his daughter’s name._

El sighs and goes to the door, opening it as Hop is leaning on the doorbell. He nearly falls into the house, and his daemon shifts backward.

“You’re the kid,” he says.

El fixes her eyes on Diarte. “What kind?” she asks.

“She’s a bobcat, El,” Joyce says, coming up behind her. “Hi, Hop.”

 _Hello_ , El thinks at Diarte. Diarte narrows her eyes.

“You were with Benny Hammond the other night. Not Will,” Hopper says.

“Yes,” El says.

“What’s your name?”

“El,” El says. Then she amends this, remembering what the cards said. “Eleven.” She holds out her arm.

Diarte and Hopper stare at her tattoo.

“Why don’t you come sit down,” Joyce says. “I’m making breakfast anyway. You can have Jonathan’s. He’s asleep.”

Hopper ventures into the house like it’s a tunnel. “It’s cold in here, Joyce,” he says. “November’s a good time to turn the heat on.”

Joyce pulls out a chair for him, her expression eloquent. Hopper sits.

“What’s your full name?” he asks El finally. Diarte climbs onto a chair nearby and sits at the table too, like a very short person.

El has gone back to putting cold eggs in her mouth. Eggs should be a warm food, she’s discovered. She sticks out her wrist for him again.

“OK,” Hopper says. “You don’t have a surname?”

El swallows. “I am 11. They were 10 and 9. I don’t know other names.”

“Where are, um, 10 and 9 now?” Joyce asks from the stove without turning around.

“I think they died,” El says softly. She’s been turning over other possibilities in her head, but she knows in her heart what happened to them. The same thing that happened to the rats.

“Wait, excuse me,” Hopper says. “Your _name_. . . your full name . . . is Eleven. And 10 and 9, those were your—siblings? Parents?”

“Subjects.” She’s finished eating; she checks the room and sees that there is a system: dirty plates in the sink, clean plates in a rack. She gets up to carry her plate over.

“Subjects?” Hopper shakes his head. “Look, where do you live? Joyce, did you take in some kind of runaway?”

El sets her plate carefully in the sink. “The Department of Energy.”

“What?”

“That’s what the sign said. I saw it when I left.”

Joyoce sets Jonathan’s food in front of Hopper, but he doesn’t pick up his fork. “That laboratory off at the edge of town? Well, where were you before that?”

El finds it easier to direct her statements at Diarte, whose face is sharp but kind, lacking the exhaustion under Hopper’s eyes. “I was born there.”

Hopper looks at Joyce. Joyce says, as Cinhelm jumps up on the counter, “Mike Wheeler found her. He says she was wandering the woods. I couldn’t let her walk around at night. Not with . . .”

El watches Hopper’s rubbery face. Finally she says, “You know when people are lying.”

“Yeah, kid, most people aren’t exactly, you know, Sarah Bernhardt.” Diarte shifts in the chair.

“No,” El says. “You just . . . know.”

Diarte looks up.

“I don’t like liars,” Hop says carefully. “Not too many police officers do.”

“You know Joyce told you the truth,” El says.

“I know”—Hopper directs his words to Joyce—“that you saw something, and I believe you that you saw something, and I believe that _you_ believe you found your son’s daemon—“

Joyce’s face tightens and she opens her mouth.

“And you know the man at the quarry lied to you,” El says, talking over Joyce’s attempted interjection.

“How—“

 “I just do,” El says. “Like you.”

Hopper lets out a sort of scoff and drums his fingers on the table.

“What happened to Benny?” he says finally.

“They shot him,” El says.

“Where did you grow up?”

“The laboratory.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eleven.”

“Who shot Benny?”

“Someone who works for Papa.”

“Who’s Papa? Your father?”

El finds this one hard to answer; it takes her a few seconds of staring at the floor. “He’s in charge of the scientists.”

Hopper taps his fingers on the table again. “Take your daemon case out. I need to log what species.”

“She doesn’t have one,” Joyce says.

He pales, and Diarte shrinks back. “They severed you? I’ve never heard of anyone surviving that.”

El shakes her head.

“She never had one,” Joyce says. “That’s what Mikey Wheeler told me.”

“That’s not possible,” Hopper says. “The longest anyone has survived being severed is thirty-seven minutes, and that was with a lot of adrenaline.”

Joyce gets up halfway through Hopper’s speech and disappears down the hall. She comes back holding the sleeping Astrea and sets her down on the table. “Well?”

Hopper stares at Astrea. Diarte jumps onto the table, making it wobble a bit, and gets whiskers-close to Astrea’s sleeping face.

“It’s her,” Diarte says quietly to Hopper.

“I don’t—” Hopper looks up, at a loss.

“A lot of weird shit—excuse me, El—a lot of weird stuff is happening in Hawkins, Hop,” Joyce says. “I think maybe we need to ignore what’s supposed to be true, and pay attention to what is actually going on. Because that is my son’s daemon, and she is alive, and that means he is alive. Somewhere. And I’m going to find him.”

She and Hopper are motionless for a minute, looking at each other, and then Hopper turns to El.

“Do you think Will could be in the laboratory?”

“You can’t go there,” El whispers. “They’ll kill you. Like Benny.”

“No, they won’t.” Hopper stands up and turns so that she can see his gun, and takes out his badge. Diarte leaps down to the floor. “See this? That means I am allowed to investigate wherever I think Will might be, and they can’t take me out without a lot of people wondering where I went.”

“You don’t know Papa,” El says.

“I plan to get to know him pretty intimately,” Hopper says. “Severing any person from their daemon is a capital crime. I think a lot of people are going to know this bastard’s name by the time this is over.”

“I want to come with you,” Joyce says. “If he’s there—”

“OK,” Hopper says.

“OK?” Cinhelm and Joyce look identically shocked.

“OK,” Hopper says. His eyes are full of some emotion El doesn’t know. She dips briefly, curiously into his mind, but it’s just Joyce in there, just her face. “I can drop El at the station, keep her safe.”

“No,” El says. The table wobbles. She grabs the edge to steady it and herself. “He’ll find me there.”

“It’s the county jail,” Hopper says. “He’ll need to get past three armed officers and Flo. You’ll be fine.”

“No. _No_ ,” El says. “I’ll go—I’ll go to school. With Jonathan.” She runs to the couch and finds her wig, puts it on lopsidedly. “I’ll blend.”

“You’ll blend,” Hopper repeats. Joyce fixes El’s wig for her. “Yeah, you look like Marcia Brady.”

“Hop,” Joyce says.

“I just don’t . . .” He shrugs. “OK. But you’re not going home by yourself, you hear? No bike riding. You and Jonathan stay at school and don’t leave until you see me and your mother—” He breaks off and coughs. “Until you see me and Joyce come back for you. Just stay in the gym.”

“OK,” El says breathlessly.

“Thank you,” Joyce says to Hop. She crouches down to Diarte. “Thank you.”

Hop looks down at her. Puts his hands in his pockets.

 

 

Jonathan glances over at the bewigged child in his passenger seat. “You OK over there?”

“You have a song stuck in your head,” El informs him. “It’s annoying.”

“Dah nah nah nah, nah na-nah dah,” Jonathan says, monotone.

“That one.” El looks out the window. “What are the words.”

“Why?”

“I want to hear you sing out loud.”

Jonathan shakes his head.

“Filomena wants you to.”

“How do you know?”

El glances at Filomena, who gives an opaque chirp.

Jonathan drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Under his breath, he sings, “The indecision’s bugging me.”

“If you don’t want me, set me free.” El joins in.

“I thought you didn’t know the words,” Jonathan says.

El ignores him. “Exactly who I’m supposed to be . . .”

He smiles. His lips crack at the edges a little, painfully. Cold weather. He hopes he’s not bleeding.

 

 

“El!” Mike says, standing up too fast and sending his notebook crashing to the floor. The class giggles.

“Class, this is Ellen Byers, Will’s cousin,” the teacher says, placing a hand between El’s shoulder blades. “She’ll be joining us just for today.”

“Can she sit here?” Mike asks loudly. “We have an open seat.”

“That’s very friendly of you, Michael.” The teacher guides El into the seat beside Mike. She sets Karen Wheeler’s case on her lap. She had to find a new cricket before they could leave for the school. “Today we’re learning about the history of Thanksgiving. I’ll get you an extra pair of scissors.”

A boy in front of Mike turns around. “Trying to screw your way through the Byers family, huh, Mikey? First Will, now this chick?”

“She looks like a dyke,” his taller friend murmurs. “You’d do better with Will’s brother.”

“Shut up,” Gelasia says, darting out in her long-rat form and bopping the first one’s daemon on the nose. Dustin quickly scoops her up and stuffs her into his backpack.

“Fuckin freak,” the first one says, sweeping his daemon under his chair with one foot. “Look around, ferret. Do you see other daemons talking like they’re people? No? That’s because you’re a freak.”

“You’re the freak,” Gelasia says muffledly from inside the backpack. “You had lice like three times, Troy. You’re an only child. How?”

“I’m going to wait for silence,” the teacher says.

Mike hands El a pencil as they begin reading a handout about maize. “What are you doing here?” he whispers.

“Who are they?” El asks.

Mike glances at Troy and the taller one. “Just some mouthbreathers.”

 

 

Jonathan’s washing his hands when Nancy barges into the bathroom. He jerks and hits his hand on the faucet. “Ow—ah—you’re not—” He breaks off. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Nancy says. Cuddy trots in beside her, nods at Filomena. “I need to talk to you.”

“This is the boys’ bathroom.”

Nancy looks around. “I know that.” Cuddy goes to stand against the door.

“OK,” Jonathan says. “I guess . . . you know that.”

“I heard about Will,” Nancy says.

“That’s not him,” Jonathan says immediately. “Hopper told us. It’s some kind of—” He shakes his head and Filomena flies a little circle before settling again. “Some kind of hoax. I don’t know.”

“He’s in that place, isn’t he,” Nancy says.

Jonathan nods. “He’s alive. He’s . . . I know he’s alive.”

Nancy nods. She comes a little closer, hovers her hand over his face. “Is your eye OK?”

“Who cares about my eye,” Jonathan says. He ducks his head. “Is Steve’s . . .?”

“He’s fine.” Nancy brushes one finger over his eyebrow. It stings good and bad. He catches her hand.

“Stop,” he says.

Nancy doesn’t move. “I want to go get Barb,” she says.

Jonathan drops her hand, stuffs his own into his jeans. “I don’t know, Nancy. That thing . . .”

“I think it was the blood,” Nancy says. “I think because Barb was bleeding, that’s why it . . .” She bites her lip. “I just need someone to distract it in the real world while I go into that place and get Barb.”

“Nancy, that’s—you saw that thing. It’ll kill you. You can’t carry Barb by yourself, anyway.”

“I’ll bring a wheelbarrow. Or you can go in, and I’ll distract it. I don’t care. Her family—“ Nancy’s voice goes up at the end, and tears appear in her eyes. “They’re so worried about her, and I can’t—”

“Nancy—”

“And if Will is in there, with that animal, how long—we _have to_ , Jonathan. We have to.”

“Nancy.” Filomena turns around and around on his shoulder. “We can’t.”

The stall at the end of the bathroom opens and Steve Harrington steps out, his lip split, his face one big bruise. He hunches his shoulders a little. “I’ll help,” he says quietly.

 

 

El has a lunchbox just like everybody else. She takes hers out. It has a cheese-and-tomato sandwich in it.

“Give me your Cheetos,” Lucas says.

“No,” Mike says, holding them out of reach. “I’ll make an exchange, but it must be equal to the value of the Cheetos.”

“Oreos?”

“Incorrect.”

Lucas drops the Oreos into his lap dejectedly.

“I’ll take those off your hands, buddy,” Dustin offers, his mouth full of egg salad.

“Look at you all with your matching little friends,” Troy lobs at them on his way past their table.

“Romantic,” his friend adds.

Their daemons had been what Mike tells her are muskrats, but at Troy’s words they all change in the blink of an eye, Mike’s to a frog, Dustin’s to a bird, and Lucas’s to a cat.

El yanks Troy’s pants down with a flick of her eyelids. “Mouthbreathers. Right?”

Troy runs out of the cafeteria.

“Did you do that?” Gelasia asks.

El smiles.

 

 

“OK, I saw his car leave,” Dustin whisper-yells, running down the hallway toward them with his shoes untied.

“You’re going to trip,” Lucas says. “You need Velcro shoes.”

“Velcro is for babies.” Gelasia turns into a little bug with wings and Dustin scoops her up in both hands. “I can tie my damn shoes.”

Ouida, still a cat, bats at Dustin’s laces.

“You dumbass,” Dustin says, giggling.

El puts her ear to the door.

“This is like a heist movie,” Mike mumbles.

The door clicks and El twists the handle. “OK, now say ‘We’re in,’” Lucas instructs.

“We’re in,” El repeats solemnly.

“You’re a natural, kid,” Dustin tells her as the boys file past her into Mr. Clarke’s office.

They gather around the ham radio and stare. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Lucas says. “Do you realize how much trouble we’re in if we get caught?”

“We’re not going to get caught,” Mike says. “El can tell when there’s people around, right, El?”

El makes a quick sweep. “Everybody’s by the buses.”

“No, now you say ‘All clear,’” Dustin says.

El smiles. “All clear.”

It takes all four of them to lift the ham radio. “Can’t you just like,” Dustin asks, making a flying motion with his free hand.

“I fall down,” El says. “After heavy things.”

“I don’t know, I’d pay bigger prices for being literally magic,” Lucas grumbles, helping them heft it past the door into the hallway.

They make it halfway over the bridge to the back road where Jonathan’s left his car when there’s a little scuffling noise and Dustin doubles over, nearly causing the rest of them to drop the ham radio. They barely manage to set it down. 

“How’d you do it?” Troy asks, breathing hard. “You weren’t anywhere near me.”

El stares. Troy’s got Gelasia clutched in his hand. 

She didn't feel him come up behind them. How did she miss it?

“Answer me or I crush this ugly little bug,” Troy says. His fingers twitch. His own daemon circles behind him in the form of an enormous shaggy dog.

“She didn’t have anything to do with it!” Mike cries. “Let Gelasia go!”

Dustin grunts. He’s curled up on the ground, sweating.

“While she’s thinking about it, Wheeler,” Troy says, “why don’t you go jump off the bridge.”

Lucas scoffs.

“I mean it,” Troy says. “I’m sick of looking at your stupid praying mantis face. Jump off or Gelasia gets it. Now.” He turns to El. “How’d you do it?”

El is afraid if she does anything, Troy’s twitchy hand will contract and crush Gelasia. Dustin twists on the ground. She doesn’t know what to do.

Mike climbs up on the edge of the bridge.

“Don’t, Mike,” Dustin moans from the ground. He’s barely conscious.

“It won’t hurt,” Mike says. “The pond’s dried up. I’ll probably only break a leg.” He glances down and swallows.

“It’s like two stories!” Lucas yells. “Troy, let Gelasia go. You know it’s illegal to grab someone else’s daemon like that?”

Troy makes a show of looking around. “I don’t see any cops. Guess they’re all out dealing with your dead faggy friend.”

His finger twitches again and his daemon growls. Mike’s feet wobble on the wooden railing.

“Stop,” El whispers.

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.” Troy looks at Mike. “Go on, Wheeler. Guess that’s what everybody’ll call you when you’re a quadriplegic.”

“Everybody’ll have to call you from behind glass, because you’ll be in jail,” Lucas spits, glancing from the dog to Troy and back. “That’s way too far down. If he lands wrong, he’ll die.”

“‘He’ll die,’” Troy whines in an imitation of Lucas, but El sees that his grip on Gelasia has loosened and his daemon is pacing.

“DO SOMETHING!” Lucas yells at El.

El glances at Mike just as his feet slip and he goes over the edge.

“NO—” Dustin tries to get up. Lucas rushes toward the railing. Troy’s eyes widen and he lets go of Gelasia, who turns into a mouse on the way down and zips toward Dustin.

Mike’s mind is a mess of fear and satisfaction. El feels something in her nose pop as she locates his body, snatches it up inches from the ground. Blood gushes down her chin. She heaves him back up and drops him on the bridge.

The huge shaggy dog is gone; a rabbit cowers behind Troy’s leg. Troy’s face is full of horror. He turns to run back toward the school, but El yanks his feet out from under him. He falls hard, knocking the wind out of his lungs. From the ground, his mouth makes the shape of a _What_.

“Mouthbreather,” El says, and twitches her finger just like he did. His arm snaps.

“El, no,” Dustin says, crawling toward her.

Troy wails.

“Don’t touch my friends,” El tells him.

Lucas grabs her and pins her arms behind her back. “Stop, El!”

She whirls and Lucas staggers back. Behind her, she feels Troy get to his feet and shuffle as fast as he can toward the school.

“He hurt Dustin,” she says. “He hurt Mike.”

“I’m OK,” Mike says. “But something’s wrong with Tuilelaith.”

“Because I grabbed you,” El says. Her throat closes up. “I hurt you?”

“No,” Dustin wheezes. “Mike, you settled.”

Tuilelaith looks down at her glossy feathers, the same ones she was wearing when the three boys found El in the woods. “Is that what it is?”

“You’re a bird,” Mike breathes. “I’m a bird.”

They all look at El. She swallows. “What kind,” she says in a small voice.

Mike’s face suddenly bursts into a grin. He stands up and puts his arms around El. Tuilelaith flaps along with him, landing on the railing next to her. El doesn’t know what to do. He smells like Cheetos and soap and flowers. “Raven,” he says into her fake hair.

 

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

Steve’s house has birds everywhere. Birds embroidered on the rug, birds painted on the decorative ceramic bowls, even a huge painting of migrating geese silhouetted against the sky.

“You guys have a theme going, huh?” Jonathan says as Steve leads him and Nancy into the house, his goose daemon waddling beside him.

Steve glances over his shoulder. “What? Oh. Yeah. Bird daemons on both sides. My mom’s psychic told her it was a good omen. She’s kind of—” He twirls a finger at his temple. “Obsessed.”

“Is it a good omen? To have a bird?” Nancy asks, her eyes flicking to Filomena.

Steve rolls his eyes, unlocking the garage door. “Supposedly it’s good luck to have the same species throughout the family, and people with bird daemons are like three percent more likely to live above the poverty line or something.” He steps inside the garage and walks unerringly to the middle, yanking the chain to light the bulb. “I think it’s treading water drawing conclusions from stats like that, though. I mean, maybe it’s just, you know, people don’t trust cold-blooded daemons as much, maybe it’s just the bird people are taking the jobs that should be going to snake people or whatever.” He pulls out a handgun from the tool box. “Gotcha. What else?”

It’s warm in Steve’s house, even in the garage. Jonathan feels the tension creeping out of his shoulders even as he finds it irritating that Steve’s house should make him feel comforted, relaxed.

“Jonathan’s got his rifle,” Nancy says. Cuddy blinks his orange devil’s eyes slowly, lending sweet, skinny Nancy a slight air of malevolence. “Rope?”

“Do you think it can drown?” Jonathan asks suddenly.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

“It has to breathe, right?” Nancy swallows. “To make that noise? I didn’t see any gills, but, you know, I was screaming more than I was checking for gills.”

“Can you guys swim?”

“You have photographic proof.” Steve’s daemon puffs its feathers subtly.

“Right.” Jonathan ducks his head. “Well, I can swim, too.”

Cuddy shuffles from foot to foot.

“Do you have a plan?” Nancy asks.

Jonathan scratches his neck. “I think so.”  

 

 

El approaches the pile of lamps. They flicker gently as she comes near, like they’re waving hello.

“Jesus H penis, this thing is heavy,” Dustin whimpers as he and Lucas and Mike set it down next to El.

“Mrs. Byers! Aren’t you going to tell Dustin not to say penis?” Mike calls.

Joyce looks up from chewing on her thumbnail. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She’d picked them up at the gym last night long after Mike and Lucas and Dustin had had to go home to their various families. Hopper wasn’t with her. They had gone to the laboratory and the lab had let him in, but Joyce, badgeless, was forced to wait in the squad car. Eventually she’d driven the squad car back to the police station and told them where Hopper was. They’d sent two more officers to the labs and a third to drive Joyce home. Last night El had heard her asking the cards where Hopper was. El dipped into Joyce’s brain: Seven of Wands. _Defensiveness? The enemy?_ Joyce had thought. But El knew what the card meant: _At the laboratory._ A nonanswer.

“So how does this work?” Dustin asks. “Are you just going to like . . . ask the cards for each step?”

“That would be inefficient, Dustin,” Lucas says.

 _That would be inefficient, Dustin_ , Gelasia mouths from just below Lucas’s sightline. El accidentally catches Dustin’s gaze and his eyes screw up in amusement. She feels her face doing the same thing. How did he do that?

“I figured we’d disassemble the radio, identify each set of parts with a number, and the cards can use the numbers in combination—say, a five of clubs and a two of spades means part 52, a blink of the lights means “connect to,” four of hearts means part 4—connect part 52 to part 4.”

“Tarot cards don’t have clubs and spades, but the rest of it makes sense,” Mike says.

The phone rings once, then subsides.

“I think it likes the idea,” El says.

Lucas beams, and Ouida climbs his arm as a salamander.

Mike reaches for the ham radio and Lucas slaps his hand away. “What are you doing?”

“Ow! I’m labeling, dickmunch!”

“You’ll break it! I need to be the one to take it apart or we’ll have a pile of crap _and_ no Will.”

“Mike,” Joyce says. All four kids freeze.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Byers,” Lucas mumbles.

She tilts her head and regards them with those dark-ringed eyes for a second. “Don’t say dickmunch,” she tells them at last.

Dustin’s eyebrows shoot up and Mike turns bright red.

El feels her face making that screwed-up expression again. She can’t help it, and yet she doesn’t mind. Strange.

 

 

“Where are your parents?”

Steve looks up. “Hm?”

Jonathan casts his eyes down, toward the gun he’s cleaning. Better to pay attention. “I just mean, they seem to be not . . . home a lot.”

“You stalking me?”

Jonathan shakes his head quickly. His skin feels too tight.

Steve huffs out air, a half-laugh. “Just kidding. I mean, obviously you’ve stalked me in the past, but I believe people can break their patterns, buddy.” He digs through a tin can full of ammunition, making a racket. “Or were you stalking Nancy?”

Filomena makes an abortive attempt to shoot toward the ceiling. Jonathan snatches her out of the air and pins her to the kitchen counter where he’s sitting. “I just meant because . . . the pool party . . . and today. I didn’t—” His heart feels like it’s going to explode. “Look, think whatever the fuck you want about me. I’m not a stalker.” He sets the gun down carefully—it’s unloaded, but you never know—and leaps off the counter.

“Hey, hey, wait.” Steve jumps down, too. His goose follows him in a riot of feathers. Jonathan eyes the gun in his hand. “I’m just razzing you, OK? I mean, you had pictures of Nancy in her fucking bra, man. What am I supposed to think about that?” He runs his non-gun hand through his enormous hair. “I get that you’re trying to help her now, but come on. You were out there in the woods jerking it to her.”

Jonathan’s face is burning up. “You’ve got the wrong idea,” he says, clutching the door frame.

“Then what were you doing out there?”

“Trying to find my brother.”

“Bull,” Steve says. “Bull.”

Jonathan grits his teeth.

Nancy walks in from the opposite entrance, Cuddy clacking behind her on the kitchen tile. “I found three!” she says brightly. “Wait, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Steve tells her. He sets the gun down on the counter next to Jonathan’s and goes over to kiss her a few seconds longer than is socially appropriate with Jonathan in the room. Nancy laughs and pushes him away.

“I gotta piss,” Jonathan mumbles, and heads off down the bird-themed hallway.

“I’m going to throw up,” Filomena says quietly into his ear. “I told you. I told you.”

“Do you think I don’t know?” Jonathan snaps. “And you don’t eat. You can’t throw up.”

“I’ll learn.” She settles into a puff on his shoulder.

 

 

Eight of Wands. Blink. Ace of Swords. Three of Cups.

“OK, finish the circuit with eight and thirteen,” Dustin yells.

“You’re getting pretty good at this,” Gelasia observes. “El, do you think perhaps Dustin is gifted like you?”

“The Force is strong with this one,” Mike Darth Vaders into his cupped hands.

“Shut up,” Dustin says, shoving him.

“Careful, idiots!” Lucas cries, making a protective circle with his arms over the pile of parts on the carpet. “My God.”

“Sometimes you sound just like your father, Lucas,” Joyce says from across the room.

Lucas frowns.

“You can tell me,” Gelasia whispers. “You know, if we’re . . . special.”

“I think you are special,” El tells her.

“Aww,” Lucas simpers, without looking up. He checks the cards and reattaches an IF transformer. “OK. Gimme the next one.”

“Part ten to part eighteen. Hey, Mike, what’s it like being settled? Do you feel different?”

“Dustin also wants to know what it’s like when your balls drop.”

“Lucas!” Joyce exclaims.

“Cold,” Mike answers. El glances from face to face as they all snort with laughter. “I don’t know,” Mike says when the laughter dies. “It’s kind of annoying that she has to stay that size. She’s heavy for a bird.”

Tuilelaith squawks.

“Sorry, girl,” Mike says, patting her on the back. “At least you’re not a goat.”

“I don’t know why Nancy never rides her daemon,” Dustin says.

“Well, how come you never ride Gelasia as a horse or something?” Lucas asks.

“She won’t let me. We’re equally lazy. Also, Mom says it tracks in four times the dirt.”

“Well, there you go,” Mike says. “Nobody in this room deserves a horse daemon because we would just ride it all the time, and that’s why we don’t have horse daemons.”

“Be a horse,” Dustin whispers to Gelasia. She blinks at him and stubbornly remains a fat little turtle. “You’re a real trial, you know that?”

“I like my raven,” Mike says, petting Tuilelaith’s slippery feathers. “She’s pretty.”

“Ugh, go find a mirror.” Lucas snaps a switch into place. “Oh, I see what we’re doing,” he murmurs. “Nice. What’s next?”

El consults the cards and frowns. “Um . . . it says we need a dragon fighter. Are there dragons?” She looks at Joyce worriedly.

“No, honey,” Joyce says. “Dragons are made-up. I think.” The three boys glance up and Joyce shrugs. “Well, the world is pretty weird right now, kids. Who am I to say.” She lights a cigarette.

“Dragon fighter,” Mike muses. His eyes widen. “It doesn’t mean your Tronica thing?”

“You can’t have my Tronica,” Dustin says, clutching Gelasia to his chest. “I only just got it. It was a birthday present.”

“We _stole_ the _ham radio_ ,” Lucas says. “You can’t donate your toy to a good cause?”

“It’s not a toy, it’s a game,” Dustin tells him. “You should know, GI Joe.”

“They’re action figures,” Lucas hisses.

“You brought it with you?” El looks at Dustin’s backpack. Gelasia hurries in front of the backpack as a large pig.

“What backpack?” Dustin says innocently.

“Come on.” Mike crawls over and shoves the squealing Gelasia out of the way. He digs a [little handheld toy](http://handheldmuseum.com/Tronica/DragonFighter.htm) out of Dustin’s bag. “This?”

El nods, and Mike hands it to Lucas.

“My baby,” Dustin moans as Lucas begins prying its case open.

“You sure all the parts will fit inside this thing?” Lucas asks.

El nods.

“Dragon Fighter,” Lucas says under his breath. “Funny.”

 

 

“I think we’re ready.” Nancy circles the pool. “We just have to wait for dark.”

The spring trap sits at the bottom, blurred by the water.

“Anybody hungry?” Steve jumps up, rubbing his hands together. “How’s Chinese sound?”

Nancy gives him a weak smile. “Extra egg rolls for me, please.”

“You got it, Wheeler.” He heads inside, toward the kitchen, his goose just barely making it inside before the door slams shut.

Nancy edges over to Jonathan on the lawn chair. “Um . . . what did Steve say to you earlier? You kind of clammed up.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jonathan turns a little.

“It matters to me.” She puts her pinky finger on his.

Jonathan jerks his hand away. “Can you just—can you just not do that, please? You have a boyfriend, Nancy. You have a boyfriend, so.” He shrugs jerkily.

Cuddy wobbles. Nancy leans back. “Is that what it’s about? Steve’s being jealous?”

“Steve’s—Steve didn’t do anything wrong,” Jonathan mumbles. “It’s me who’s—look, I want to find Will. And Barb. But you don’t have to act like you like me for me to help you. I’ll help you anyway.”

Nancy’s freckles stand out in the late-afternoon sun. “I do like you.”

Jonathan shrugs again and looks at his hands. Filomena hops down his arm.

“I don’t know why. You’re sort of a dick.”

He glances up in surprise. “Yeah. I’m—I’m sorry.”

“OK. Good.”

“I don’t mean to be a dick,” Jonathan says honestly.

“Steve doesn’t mean to be a dick either,” Nancy says, shading her eyes. “He’s really sweet most of the time.”

Jonathan thinks about the way Steve touched Nancy in the window, the long soft skim of his hands over her thin shoulders, her ribs. He nods.

“Do you really think he’s jealous?” Nancy asks.

“No,” Jonathan says. “What would he have to be jealous of?” He turns around and looks at the house, his arms folded over his knees. It’s huge, full of windows, open to the setting sun like a dollhouse. All those carefully chosen pieces of art. Steve inside, on the phone, his tight jeans, his pretty mouth.

“Well,” Nancy says. Cuddy taps his hooves against the concrete. “Do you like me?” She catches him before he can reply and adds, “Be honest.”

Jonathan opens his mouth, then closes it again. There’s an awkward silence which spools out into another silence, then another. He sees her about to speak again and hurries to say, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Nancy repeats, startled. “Well, OK then.”

“Are you—upset by that?” Jonathan demands. “You shouldn’t want me to say anything at all! You’re dating, you know, him!” He gestures at Steve inside, at the way the light’s turning his skin gold.

“We can talk about this later,” Nancy says as Steve hangs up the phone and heads for the door. She gets up and stalks across the concrete.

“What? Later?” Jonathan calls after her. “Later after we’ve killed the monster?”

She doesn’t turn around, but he can see the eyeroll in her body language.

“Nancy!” he half-shouts, and then Steve opens the door to the patio.

“Did you get my egg rolls?” Nancy asks.

“No,” Steve says. “I thought you said bean sprouts. I got you bean sprouts.”

She socks him on the shoulder.

 

 

Joyce and Cinhelm crowd around El on the floor. “It’s very . . .”

“Bright,” Cinhelm finishes. El looks at him in surprise.

The Tronica device is the size of a largeish sandwich, requiring two hands. Its color scheme is a cheerful red, yellow, and blue, like Mike’s lunchbox, and an array of numbers on the built-in keyboard allow you to select one of the symbols on the pixelated gray screen. Lucas has added three dials from the ham radio, as well as about a third of its parts, and two long metal antennae.

“Try it,” Mike suggests.

El twists one of the dials experimentally. It hums in her hands and she nearly drops it in surprise.

“What happened?” Lucas demands. “Is it not working?”

El gulps. “It’s working.” It feels just like when they put her in the tank, but she’s awake. She looks down. Her body is still there.

“Ask it if Hopper is alive,” Joyce says. Her voice sounds funny.

El selects the eye, the sun, and the cat. It’s as if she knows instinctively what each dial does, when to press the buttons. It sings to her a little, wordlessly and somehow soothingly. She glances around, but nobody else seems to hear it.

“Why did you choose those symbols?” Lucas demands. Ouida sticks her green head right up next to the screen, slithering closer.

“I don’t think any others would work,” El says. “Do you?”

Lucas glances at Mike, then Dustin, and shrugs.

The words crackle onto the gray screen, one pixel at a time.

_YES_

“Oh, thank God.” Joyce collapses into a chair.

“Look.” Mike nudges Lucas. “You made the world’s fanciest Ouija board.”

“Shut up.”

“Ask it if the house is cursed.”

“I swear to God,” Dustin says. “El, do _not_ ask it if the house is cursed.”

“Ask it if Will is alive,” Joyce murmurs. They all shut up. El turns the dials. Tree, sun, rabbit.

_YES_

Tears slip silently down Joyce’s face. “OK,” she says. “OK, that’s good.”

“We have to think of better questions,” Mike says. “These yes-or-no answers could mean anything. We need more information.”

“Um . . . where Will is?”

“No.” Mike turns to El. “What’s the most important thing we need to know, right at this very moment, in order to save Will?”

This is more complicated. El squints. It takes her a few moments to select the house, the moon, the rabbit, the anchor, and the house again.

They all watch as the words surface on the screen.

_PAPA IS COMING. GO TO THE FORT_

“Here? Right now?” Joyce looks around.

El’s stomach cramps up. “He has a gun.”

Mike and Lucas and Dustin look at each other. Gelasia curls up in Dustin’s pocket.

“OK. You kids need to go to the fort. Take the al—alethio—take the thing with you.” She stands up next to Cinhelm, wiping tears off her face. “I’ll hold him off.”

“Joyce,” El whispers. “No.”

“I am the adult here,” Joyce says. “I am not going to let any harm come to you. Any of you. Understand?”

Lucas and Dustin nod. Mike and El look at each other. He grabs her hand.

“You scream if anything happens,” Joyce says. “Scream loud.” The phone’s in her hand. “I’m calling the police. They’ll help you, too.” She looks at them. “Go!”

They run out the back door, coatless, freezing. “This way,” Mike says, pulling El by the hand. “It’s not far.”

“I’m scared,” Gelasia says, into the pounding of their footsteps on the leafy ground.

No one answers.

 

 

Nancy goes into the house to call her mom. Steve’s started a fire in the fire pit near the pool. He holds his hands out, warming them, and his daemon fluffs her feathers.

“You look cold, man,” Steve says. “You should come closer.”

Jonathan hunches on the lawn chair, pulling his hands up into his sleeves. Filomena’s attached to his collar, under his chin.

Steve’s eyes stay on him for a second longer, then he turns back to the fire. “Up to you.”

Jonathan thinks about dying, about those teeth.

“I’m gay,” he says finally.

Steve chokes on a bite of fried rice. “Uh—” His daemon flails. “What?” he says, slightly high-pitched.

Jonathan curls his hands into fists inside his shirtsleeves. “You know why I wasn’t home when I was supposed to be, the night Will disappeared?”

“Do I want to know?” Steve asks, still screechy at the edges.

Jonathan doesn’t particularly care. “I stayed late at the video store to mess around with Hank Baldrin.”

“With Baldrin?” Steve’s eyes bulge. “The tiny one? With the—” He stops.

Jonathan looks out at the pool. “That one.”

“You and Baldrin are—”

“We’re nothing,” Jonathan says. “He’s a faggot, I’m a faggot. Birds of a feather. You should know.”

Steve glances down at his goose and blushes.

“So. You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to try anything with Nancy.”

A thought clearly occurs to Steve, and he leaps out of his chair. “Those pictures were of me?”

“No!” Jonathan’s horrified. “No! I just—it’s hard to explain.”

Steve rubs a hand over his face. “I think maybe you should try.”

Jonathan considers for a minute, long enough that he starts to worry Nancy might come back. Eventually he says, “I take pictures of everything. Not just people. But especially people. I don’t—” He twists his sleeves. “I don’t understand. People.” He looks up. “I know I’m a fucking psycho. I don’t know—how not to be this way. I want to. I want to not.”

“So you take pictures of people messing around.”

“I _was_ looking for my brother.” Jonathan drops Steve’s gaze. “I was in the woods near where he disappeared. I heard you guys screaming and I—I never saw Nancy look that way before. You know she used to be kind of strange, too.”

“So did I,” Steve says. “So did everyone.”

“Yeah, well, I guess she learned. What I never learned. She was just with you, like she wasn’t thinking about anything else. I— _never_ do that. I— You always look like you’re in a movie of you, did you know that?”

Steve frowns. “I gotta tell you, I have no idea what that means.”

“Even the way you talk.” Jonathan coughs. “Your bird house.”

Steve sits down heavily on the lawn chair and regards Jonathan keenly. “You know why my parents are gone?”

Jonathan shrugs. “Business trip?”

“My dad’s on a business trip. But my mom went with him. Because she can’t be alone with me. There can’t be”—he looks back at the house, laughs—“there can’t be two of us alone in the house together. It has to be all three, because they can’t just be with each other. I think they had a kid just so they’d never have to talk about anything but me, ever again.”

Jonathan stares at him. Steve lowers his hands to his own knees and squeezes.

“They should get divorced, but they never will. Then they’d have to spend time with their kid one-on-one.”

“But you’re you,” Jonathan says.

“Yeah.” Steve smiles at his hands. “I’m me.” He looks up. “So you touched a nerve, earlier.”

“I keep hurting you,” Jonathan says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing.” Steve touches his swollen cheek gently. “It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me, actually. I live in Hawkins, Indiana, so. Never been in a real fight before.”

Jonathan laughs despite himself. “I could teach you,” he says, unable to stop laughing. “I’ve been in a lot of them.” He wheezes a little.

Steve mirrors his grin. Steam rises off the water.

The door opens and Nancy steps out onto the patio. She’s holding a knife. “Ready?” she calls across the pool.

Steve’s looking at Jonathan. “The way you look at her,” he says. “I don’t know, man. Hank Baldrin?”

“Hank Baldrin,” Jonathan confirms.

“The guy from America Video?” Nancy asks, coming closer. “What about him?”

“Jonathan was just positing that perhaps this whole thing is a Scooby-Doo prank, and all we have to do is pull off the monster’s face and underneath will be Hank Baldrin,” Steve says, deadpan.

Jonathan sticks out his hand.

“You meddling kids,” Nancy says, and slices Jonathan’s palm open.

 

 

Nothing happens for a long moment as Nancy floats, shivering, fully clothed, in the pool, right in the middle of the dark cloud of Jonathan’s blood. Then the tree near the pool bulges and groans, and the monster births itself out of the oak, sliming onto the ground.

“Holy fuck. Holy shit. What is the—oh my God. NANCY!” Steve shouts. His face is white.

“Don’t move, Nancy,” Jonathan yells. She’s treading water, teeth chattering. Cuddy’s on the steps nearby.

“We’re going to die,” Steve says. His goose daemon cowers.

“We’re not going to die,” Jonathan says.

The monster crawls across the concrete and—not into the pool. It’s coming straight for Steve, who’s made too much noise.

Jonathan makes a split-second decision and dives across its path, hurling himself into the water next to Nancy. Cuddy rears back, but holds his position.

Nancy, to her credit, rolls with the new plan. She grabs Jonathan’s hand and holds it aloft. “He’s bleeding!” she screams through blue lips. “Look!”

The monster makes that horrifying clicking noise. Its face splits apart into teeth.

“Oh my God,” Jonathan hears Steve say.

The monster slithers into the pool.

“Move, Nancy,” Jonathan snaps. She dives for the stairs, Cuddy yanking her along with their bond.

The monster moves fast in the water. Jonathan tries to move his arms like wings, tries to make it to the stairs behind Nancy, but he’s too slow. Tries to shoot, but he can’t bring his arm up fast enough.

He can see the teeth coming toward him, and then his foot—

His foot is in its jaws, and it hurts so bad—

Filomena flaps hard above him, trying to escape but yoked to him, and he wishes she could get away—

He hears one of his bones crack—

Or is that the spring trap?

And then Steve is yanking him by the armpits, splashing down into the pool. Jonathan’s boot slides off. Blood clouds the pool where his foot trails, but he’s free, Steve has pulled him up onto the stairs.

The monster roars and lunges, but the trap has it by the ankle.

It can’t get out.

“It can’t get out,” Jonathan says in disbelief. “Steve, we did it.” They clamber back onto dry land, clothes weeping. “Did Nancy make it?”

Steve nods toward the pink, gaping tree. “She’s in there somewhere.”

Cuddy is unconscious on the ground.

“Go see if she needs help. I’ll do this part,” Jonathan tells him.

Steve glares at him. He’s kneeling on the concrete, pressing a pool towel to Jonathan’s foot. “No. You’re hurt.”

“I can’t help her,” Jonathan says, his heart squeezing. He scrabbles for Steve’s gun and presses it into his hands. “You have to. I can do this.”

Steve’s eyes lock on his.

The monster hurls itself toward the side of the pool. Its frustrated scream is muffled by the tide of water it sends up toward its nonface.

When Jonathan looks back, Steve is pushing his way into the tree, his goose daemon sinking to the ground.

“OK,” Jonathan says, getting up and limping over to the edge of the pool. “Just you and me, Tooth Fairy.”

The monster growls, leaking pool water from its four lips.

Jonathan picks up the three hair dryers from where they’re attached to extension cords, and turns them on one at a time. “Ready?” he says over the noise.

The monster’s face unfurls.

Jonathan tosses the hair dryers into the pool.

The monster screams and seizes. Jonathan’s breath catches. It’s working.

A small tsunami of water goes up from the center of the pool, and Jonathan scrambles backward to avoid it.

When it clears, the monster’s gone.

The pool is opaque, purple with its blood.

Jonathan whirls, but there’s nothing behind him. The woods are empty. The tree—

The tree vomits Nancy up, and she pulls hard on something black.

Barb.

The rest of Barb’s body is shoved through by some unseen force. Her head hits the ground, and the sound is static, rotten.

“Nancy,” Jonathan says, running to her. Cuddy blinks. “Are you OK?”

Nancy wipes her face with Jonathan’s wet shirt. “No sign of Will,” she says. “You can go in.”

Steve climbs out of the tree, looking shell-shocked.

“Where is it?” Nancy asks.

“It disappeared.” Jonathan’s throat is dry. “But I think we hurt it.”

“Where’d it go?”

“I don’t know.”

Steve glances around. “If it’s not here, it must be in—in there.” He jerks his chin at the tree.

“We should call the police,” Nancy says. “We should say we found Barb in the woods.”

Steve coughs. “I’m maybe going to drain the pool first. You know. It doesn’t look great, what with all the bear traps and viscera.”

Nancy presses her face into his wet, slimy collar, and Steve glances at Jonathan and—slides a hand through Jonathan’s hair. Jonathan freezes and Steve takes his hand away.

“Your foot OK?” he asks.

“I have no idea,” Jonathan confesses.

Nancy moves over to hug him.

They sit like that for a minute, wet, frozen, clinging to each other.

 

 

It’s cold in the tent. The glimmer of Dust is faint.

El thinks Will must only barely be alive.

“Do you think Will’s mom is OK?” Dustin whispers.

Mike is looking straight at El.

“Mike,” she says quietly. “I have to go now.”

“Don’t.” His voice is strangled.

“I have to go get Will.”

Lucas clasps Mike’s shoulder.

El looks down at the Dragon Fighter. She closes her eyes.

 _Before I go_ , she thinks, _I have one more question._

 _WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO ASK,_ the voices in her head say.

El asks the question, trembling.

 _YES_ , answers the alethiometer.

She nods. Her face is wet.

And then she steps into the mirror.

 

 

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

It’s not like the tank. It really is like a mirror.

Antidust falls softly around her, like a snow.

El looks up. She’s not cold anymore. The shed is grayer than it is in real life, washed of color. Three gold bursts sit next to her. She waves her hand through one of them. It shivers. Mike.

“Who are you?”

El glances at the corner of the shed. A boy is crumpled up there, all bones, his eyes huge and listless in his half-dead face.

“You’re Will.”

The boy tries to nod, but he can barely move.

“I’m El. Your mother sent me.”

His face lifts, just a little bit. “Mom?”

El nods. “I’m going to bring you back.”

A wave of nausea hits her. She falls onto all fours.

“Are you OK?” Will croaks.

El breathes in and out through her nose. Vomiting is not permitted.

The wave passes.

“It’s close,” she whispers. “The animal. You have to be quiet.”

Will drags his arm, slowly, painfully, toward his face. He lifts a finger and places it over his lips.

El smiles. “Right,” she says. “Good.”

She stows the alethiometer in her pocket, slips her hands under his neck and his knees. He’s so light, she can lift him easily. She thinks about how Dustin carried Astrea in Lucas’s jacket, and she cradles Will to her chest.

Another wave of nausea hits her, and she fights to hold on to Will, fights to keep herself standing.

“You can do it,” Will whispers.

El grimaces and pushes. This place wants to keep her here. It wants her forever.

_No._

A horrible sliding sensation. El collapses onto her knees, dumping Will’s frail body onto the dirt floor of the fort. The other three boys jump.

“You came back.” Mike throws his arms around her.

“Will!” Lucas and Dustin half-shout.

Will opens his eyes just in time for them to roll back in his head.

“Will!” Dustin cries, shaking him. “Wake up!”

“He’s alive,” El says, disentangling herself from Mike. “Almost.”

“We have to get him to a hospital,” Lucas says furiously. He gathers Will up.

“You have to leave,” El says. “The Demogorgon is coming.”

“Coming here?” Mike asks. “To the fort?”

El nods.

Tuilelaith grips his shoulder hard with her claws.

Lucas climbs out of the fort first, Will in his arms, and Dustin follows him. When El and Mike emerge, she sees why they’re not moving.

“Hello, 11,” Papa says.

El falls to her knees.

“El?” Mike asks, rising panic in his voice. “Are you OK?”

“She’s fine,” Papa says, striding toward her. “She just needs a little pick-me-up.” He backhands El across the face.

Blood springs against her teeth. She licks them and breathes in and out. “Thank you, Papa.”

“You’re welcome.” He steps back. “Are these your friends?”

“Yes, sir,” Mike says.

“What did you do to Will’s mom?” Gelasia demands.

Papa glances at Gelasia. “Interesting,” he says. “11, what’s that you’re holding?”

“Nothing,” Lucas says, stepping in front of her. Will’s head lolls. “It’s a toy.”

“Give it to me.” He holds out his hand. “Don’t use your dirty fingers.”

El’s nose drips. She sends the alethiometer soaring across the leaves toward him.

“El, no!” Lucas cries.

She stares at him blankly.

Gunshots ring out from the direction of the Byers house. El flinches.

“11, what is this?” Papa asks, turning it over in his hands. “What a strange instrument. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was . . .” He twists one of the dials, and his eyebrows lift. “Who gave this to you?”

“No one,” El says.

“We made it,” Lucas interjects.

“I don’t believe you,” Papa says coolly. “This is an alethiometer; it’s not for children.” He turns the dial again. “There hasn’t been one of these in the world in six hundred years.”

“I don’t care what you believe,” Lucas says. He shifts Will in his arms. He’s getting tired.

“Well, in any case, they’ll need to come with us,” Papa continues. “11, please make sure your new friends follow me. We’re going home.”

He turns and walks toward the road.

“No,” El says.

“Excuse me?” Papa turns around.

“They’re not going anywhere,” El says.

Dustin whoops, then covers his mouth.

El thinks about sandwiches and cheeseburgers and Eggo. She takes two steps forward and vomits on Papa’s boots.

“Unacceptable,” Papa snaps. He kicks her in the stomach, and Lucas yelps. El crawls on her hands and knees toward the group, wiping vomit from her chin, and stands up, legs shaking.

“No,” El says again. “I am not a tool.”

“You are a tool. A beautiful tool.” Papa regards her, his expression unreadable. His mind unreadable. He’s always been a blank slate to El, except for those brief moments she’s stolen from him.

“I had a mother.” The pain sweeps through her. “Didn’t I, Papa?”

He doesn’t even twitch. “You were born in the laboratory. Stop these questions now and come home. Bring these children.”

“I don’t have a home.” El makes the screwed-up expression she learned from Dustin. “You took me from my home. Why?”

“No one took you from anywhere. You ran away because you are a child and you don’t know any better.”

“I had a daemon, didn’t I?”

El hears a sharp intake of breath from one of the boys behind her.

He doesn’t answer.

“Didn’t I, Papa? You separated us, so that half of me would be here, and half on the other side. So I could see what other people can’t see.”

He presses his lips together. “We don’t have much time.”

“You’re right,” El whispers. “I love you. I can’t stop.” Her throat is tight. “But you don’t love me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You made me so alone, Papa,” El says. She feels wetness trickling down her chin, into the neck of her shirt. “I was so alone.”

His gaze lands on her, finally, his mouth a little open. His thoughts unguarded for once. She feels his fear, determination, and his guilt—and she almost stops what she knows is about to happen, just for that guilt. She does love him.

But the second passes too quickly, and then the monster is rising over his head.

Mike screams. Will shifts in Lucas’s arms, struggles weakly.

At last Papa sees it, and he screams too. He screams her name.

No. He screams, “11!”

But that isn’t her name.

El watches him disappear into its jaws. The rest of his body falls to the ground in chunks. Blood hits her face.

The boys behind her are running, running. She hears sirens, and then—with a burst of relief—Joyce’s voice. Joyce is shouting “WILL!” over and over again, sobbing.

She has him.

He’ll live.

El has to tilt her head to see the monster. They are alone now, in the woods. Only for a few seconds before the police are here.

 “El!” Mike shouts from behind her. “Run!”

El looks over her shoulder at him. Her friend Mike Wheeler.

She turns back around.

“It’s you,” she says.

The monster moans.

“I’m so sorry,” El whispers. She steps forward, strokes its horrible flesh. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.”

It whickers at her, a scuttling insect noise.

“What was your name?” El asks, her forehead pressed against its slimy chest.

It makes a rumbling groan. “Ghhuuul.”

“Hul,” El repeats, hearing the name echoed in the alethiometer’s hum. “I wish we could have known each other.”

The monster puts its long, taloned arms around her. Its nails are dirty and broken.

El feels Mike’s eyes on her back. The sirens grow louder.

“You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you?” she asks.

It rumbles again, thunder against her chest.

“I’ve been looking for you, too,” she whispers. “Hul.”

El thinks about Papa, about Benny, about Jonathan and Will, trapped in the mirror. Cheese and tomato. Bed. Rain. Mike, falling through the air for his friend, his daemon turning to stone beside him. It’s stupid that she was only alive for a week of her entire life. She wishes it could have been more.

“You never had a chance,” she tells Hul.

Hul wails, a long keening sound in the dark.

Mike screams.

El pulls the Dust from Hul’s sick body, just like she did for all those mice and rats, just like Papa taught her. Its skin sags in her hands. Two monsters hugging in the woods. It must look—

The last of the Dust pulls free, and El’s daemon explodes into nothing.

She thinks, _Mike_

And then

 

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**epilogue**

 

Jonathan hoists himself onto the next branch, crouches, and knocks on the window.

Nancy slides it open.

“Can’t sleep?” she whispers. She’s in braids and a dowdy nightgown.

Jonathan shakes his head. “Hopper’s with Mom and Will. Feels weird having him in the house all the time.”

Nancy moves back so he can clamber ungracefully over the sash. He half-falls into the room and she catches him, laughing mostly silently.

“Door locked?” he asks.

“Good to go,” Steve says.

Jonathan startles. “Sorry,” he blurts. “Sorry—” He makes for the window and Nancy catches his arm.

“It’s fine,” she says. “Steve knows you come over.”

Jonathan glances at Steve.

Steve scrubs at his hair. “I can’t sleep either.”

“Lie down,” Nancy tells him. “That’s the first step.”

Steve rolls his eyes and slides over on the bed. Nancy climbs in next to him. “You look like a hot Pilgrim,” Steve informs her. Cuddy curls up at the foot of the bed next to Steve’s goose.

Jonathan stands with his hands in his pockets. “This is weird.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asks innocently. Nancy bursts into giggles.

“What will your mom think?”

“You mean if she picks the lock or climbs the tree? She’d probably be pretty freaked,” Nancy says, raising her eyebrows.

“It’s just weird,” Jonathan says. “I don’t know.”

“Please, Jonathan,” Nancy says. “I don’t want you to go back to the house alone.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Jonathan says, grabbing a pillow and a blanket off the bed.

“I think that’s weirder,” Steve observes.

“Well, he could roll under the bed if my mom broke the door down,” Nancy points out.

Filomena settles on Jonathan’s breastbone.

There’s a brief silence, and then Steve asks, “How’s Will?”

Jonathan smiles. “He’s really good. He gained four pounds this week.”

“That’s amazing,” Nancy says. Cuddy makes a goat noise of agreement.

“How are Barb’s parents?” Jonathan asks.

He hears a creak of the mattress as Nancy rolls over. “I think they’re going to move.”

Another silence.

Steve says, “So I’m banned from having pool parties from now on.”

Jonathan surprises himself by laughing. He hears Nancy laugh too.

“Was it—” Nancy’s puffing air. “Was it the bear trap, or the multiple guns?”

“It was that I ruined three hair dryers,” Steve says.

“Oh God,” Nancy says. Filomena bobs up and down on Jonathan’s chest.

“Steve,” Jonathan says suddenly. “What’s your daemon’s name?”

There’s a pause, and then Steve says, “Uh, Yachne. Why?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to know.”

“OK,” Steve says.

Jonathan listens to the slowing of their breaths. He must be there in the dark on Nancy’s bedroom floor for an hour or more.

He sits up.

Steve is asleep, clutching Nancy to his chest. Her mouth is open, one of her braids across her face.

“Nancy,” Jonathan whispers.

Her eyes open. Not very deep asleep, then.

None of them ever are.

“What?” she whispers back.

“Did you tell him?”

She nods slowly.

“What did he say?”

“He said he’s thinking it over.”

Jonathan doesn’t know what to do with that.

“Come sleep with me,” Nancy says, holding out her arms.

He’s so tired.

He climbs into her soft, sweet-smelling bed, and presses his face into her cheek. “Thank you,” he whispers.

He doesn’t remember what happens next, only that it’s bright morning, and Nancy is shaking his shoulder, pushing him toward the window. “My mother’s up,” she whispers.

He nearly falls down the tree, but catches himself just in time. Steve’s already on the ground, hands in his pockets.

“So Nancy told me she kissed you yesterday.”

Jonathan braces himself.

“Is it just her, then?” Steve asks.

Jonathan shakes his head.

“There’s another girl?”

“No,” Jonathan breathes.

“Oh.” Steve leans against the tree, sucks a big breath in. Nods.

Jonathan tips himself forward and presses his lips to Steve’s. Filomena flutters up into the air above them. It’s so soft it’s barely a kiss at all.

“Do it again,” Steve says, his eyes still closed tight, like he’s waiting for something to drop on him.

Jonathan does.

“Feels weird,” Steve says, still not opening his eyes. “Everything’s weird now.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan agrees.

Steve opens his eyes. “Can I bag a ride to school?”

“My car’s like a mile away,” Jonathan says.

“That’s cool.”

They set off toward the road, Yachne following, Filomena on Jonathan’s shoulder.

 

 

Mike sneaks into the woods. They used to have the area sealed with crime-scene tape, but not anymore.

Tuilelaith flies beside him. He never felt lonely before. He always had her. And Dustin, and Lucas.

The fort is mostly collapsed. Mrs. Byers wants to tear it down and Will hasn’t objected.

There’s a burned spot on the ground. Mike gets on his hands and knees and sweeps his fingers through the dead leaves and pine needles and dirt.

It takes him half an hour like that, on his knees, before he finds it.

The alethiometer is battered, one dial missing, and covered in dark stains. He sits down, careless of his corduroys, and stabs at the buttons.

Which ones? El just knew somehow. Mike doesn’t know.

He picks the ones that seem most like El.

The moon.

The compass.

The candle.

At first, it seems like nothing is going to happen.

One pixel blinks. Then another.

Finally, in crackling letters, they answer him.

 

_S̢̀͟͢Ǫ̢͡͏̡O̡N͢͡_

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
